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Oct. 29, 2013 - Art Bell
03:08:56
Dark Matter with Art Bell - John McAfee - Paul Gunter - Fukushima and Nuclear Reactor Hazards
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Wanna take a ride?
From the high desert and the Great American Southwest, exclusively on Sirius XM Radio, this is Dark Matter with your host, Art Bell.
Extra!
Now, here's Art.
I'm never gonna get that right!
I'm always interrupting him, huh?
Extra Terrestrial Radio, good evening everybody.
I am Art Bell.
Welcome to all the Dark Riders.
Coming up in a moment, John McAfee.
Just a couple of quick notes.
Ghost Picture Contest, as you know, judging is underway.
We've got some really good and really bad ghost photos up there for Halloween.
For spooky matter.
So get up there and judge.
You are the judge.
The winner gets a free radio and a one-year subscription to Sirius XM.
Ghost stories, go to me.
Little sample of the ghost story.
And your phone number, please.
And we may call you.
Send them to artbell at artbell.com.
On the website tonight, Scott thinks he's found Planet X, strange creature down in Columbia, really strange, and of course the quadcopter ghost, all of that coming up in a moment.
Well, all of that's coming up actually right now, but in a moment, John McAfee.
If you're listening to this program on a computer, sitting at a desk somewhere, chained to the desk somewhere, Then I've got a really good idea for you.
It is the FM Transmitter 2, made by Sea Crane Company.
It is a broadcast transmitter, in essence.
In other words, it broadcasts whatever you put into it onto every FM radio in the house.
So, instead of being chained to your computer, you simply plug in an audio plug to this thing, set, you know, whatever frequency you want on the FM band, and voila!
Every radio in the house has the program.
So, um, how much?
$49.95.
That's really cheap for this.
Really cheap.
Powered by an AC adapter.
Runs on a couple AA batteries as well.
And it gives you freedom.
So, so much freedom.
In fact, you know, I thought so many people have Sirius XM in their cars or trucks or whatever.
You could even take this out to the car and sort of rig it up a little bit.
Remember not to put that extra 30 inches of antenna on it for super-extended range.
You're not supposed to do that.
But you could put it out in the car and it would broadcast into the house.
I mean, there are so many good uses.
It'll broadcast whatever you put into it.
800-522-8863 is the number.
800-522-8863.
The C-Crane Company.
to you.
John McAfee.
I've been wanting to talk to John for a long time.
I had McAfee antivirus software in my computer, and so I've wanted to have a talk with this man.
We'll be right back.
John McAfee was born in the United Kingdom, raised here in the U.S., has been employed by NASA's Institute for Space Studies, UNIVAC, Xerox, Computer Sciences Corporation, and Lockheed.
While employed by Lockheed in the 80s, McAfee received a copy of the Pakistani brain computer virus and began developing software to combat viruses.
In 87, he founded McAfee Associates, a computer antivirus company.
Around two years later, he quit Lockheed and began working full-time at McAfee Associates.
He remained with the company that he created until 94.
He continues his entrepreneurial ways to this very day with various tech-related ventures, including one of the latest, D-Central.
I love that name, vCentral.
A pocket-sized device that would, in theory, make it difficult for governmental agencies to snoop on your online activities by creating so-called floating networks.
I would assume included in those would be the big NSA guys.
Alright, so John McAfee coming up, and I'd like to start a program for him to perhaps admit some personal shame.
Well, let me phrase that.
Admit that he killed, no, murdered in cold blood any number of computers with his antivirus program.
How about it, John?
Well, hello, Art.
That was quite an introduction, sir.
I thought it was heading in a different direction, which is fine.
I'll talk about anything.
You see, that gets my guest's adrenaline going at the beginning of the show.
You bet, you bet.
No, I want an answer to the question, actually.
I had Macafee Antivirus, and you know what, John?
When you wrote it in the beginning, it was good.
It really was good.
But I kind of found that it did a lot of strange things after a while.
It kind of got, I don't know, like a spider web into the computer.
It was everywhere!
Well, it's a very intrusive program these days.
It's sort of like the corporation which grew with it.
You know, large corporations tend to move slowly, become bureaucratic, take up space, and do very little.
So I think that's what happened to the software.
Same thing.
When I first founded it, we had 87% of the world marketplace, and it was a very efficient and fairly good program.
I've had nothing to do with it for over 15 years, so I can't be blamed.
On my guest section of the website tonight, I have posted the McAfee Guide to Uninstalling McAfee Antivirus.
And it's for adults only, by the way, folks, so be very careful who you show this to.
But it's hilarious, and it demonstrates the kind of suffering that John was going through down in Belize, right, John?
That's correct.
I did that because the mainstream press had such fun.
You know, attaching names to me.
Paranoid and gun-toting, womanizing, drug-taking.
So I thought, well, why not?
I'll just make fun of all of that, and myself at the same time.
Actually, Don, that works.
People used to call me up and say, I was in the CIA.
I finally gave up denying it, so I started admitting it.
Why not?
Why not?
If you wear the labels proudly, they change character.
So that's what I did, and it seems to have done fine by me.
Well, it leaves him speechless, which will do.
All right, so I do want to ask you about everything that happened.
I really did follow your case carefully down with what was going on in Belize, John.
As much as you can tell me about the Belize part of it, tell me.
Well, I moved to Belize five years ago.
It's almost six years now, because it's a very beautiful country.
It has one of the most spectacular sea coasts, the second largest barrier reef in the world, and great jungles.
I did fine until I moved into the interior, which was very foolish of me.
And I did what a lot of Americans do.
I think, you know, even subconsciously, if we don't think we're arrogant, I think subconsciously we are.
I thought I understood the culture, but believe me, I did not.
Many third world countries are based on principles which are alien to us in America.
You know, rule is by fear, and every other negative aspect of government is prevalent and prominent.
So, I was there for a short period of time, The local politician came and asked if I would just give him $2 million for his re-election donation.
In return, he would give me a whole bunch of land and all sorts of benefits and who knows what.
It did not appeal to me.
It's how third world countries work.
I just got back.
I'm 68 years old as well, by the way, John.
We're the same age.
I just came back from living in the Philippines for several years.
I'm a permanent resident there.
So I do understand, and the corruption has been the way business is done.
As long as you understand that everything has to be greased a little bit, you'll get along fine, but it's a heck of a way to do business.
It's alien to me, and I don't understand the principles of it.
To me, it's extortion.
And everything is coerced, and if you don't like it, then you pay the piper.
They sent 42 armed soldiers onto my property, shot my dog, destroyed about a half million dollars' worth of property, handcuffed me in the sun for 14 hours, then left.
A week later, a representative came back and asked if I had reconsidered.
I said no, and immediately went to the international press.
Yelling corruption and unfair play.
I shouldn't have done that either.
That began a war that lasted for seven months between myself and police.
And because I had all the international press, they couldn't quite do anything to me.
And then my neighbor was killed and immediately they wanted to question me along with all of my neighbors.
But I knew, because in Belize you can hold someone for 60 days for questioning.
If you don't like their answers, you can hold them another 60, and another, and another.
I would just be in jail forever, and that would silence me, which is what they wanted.
Instead, I decided not to be questioned, which in America is a right, by the way.
That's right.
Just say, I want my lawyer, and you're done.
Pardon?
Just say, I want my lawyer, and you're done.
That's right.
They want my lawyer.
You know, you have the right to remain silent in this country.
I did not choose to be questioned.
They chose to question me and I went on the run.
A month and a half later, after hiding for 35 days, I crossed over into Guatemala.
How did you get that done?
I mean, you know, usually aborters are guarded and so forth.
Well, it was not easy.
All the army and all the police had my photo.
They had checkpoints everywhere.
First of all, I chose a rainy day.
In Belize, as in much of Central America, if it's raining, police do not get out of their car or out of their office.
Same in the Philippines.
Same thing, right.
So I chose a rainy day because I'd been there long enough to know that policemen don't get wet.
I went through five checkpoints, and all the police were huddled in their cars and just waving everybody through, including me.
I also had reigns for a double to be arrested in Mexico, which slackened the southern border, and that was also in the international press.
So somebody temporarily, if I got this right, somebody temporarily got arrested in southern Mexico and so then I would assume all Belize police went north?
They went north.
So when I finally got to the border there was simply no one there, even the Coast Guard was gone.
So then I rented a fishing boat and the fishing boat took me the 25 miles to Livingston in Guatemala and that's how I escaped.
But that wasn't the end of my trials.
I was also, I was with two journalists from Vice Magazine who posted a photo of me in Guatemala without taking the location data out.
And so the next thing I know I'm arrested in Guatemala and with the help of a very good lawyer was returned to America seven days later.
You had a heart attack down there, right?
I did.
It was a tricky situation.
What happened is the... Okay, first of all, the political situation between Guatemala and Belize is very subtly sophisticated.
The Guatemalans want a seaport.
They don't have one.
Belize would like to give them a seaport in exchange for all sorts of support.
They were about to sign an accord last year.
Just a few... I showed up a few weeks before it was to be signed.
So the Guatemalans did not want me in the country and really wanted me returned to Belize.
My lawyer, who is the ex-attorney general for Guatemala, filed an appeal that was turned down.
He was going to file another appeal, but we had three hours between the time limit set by the judge to release me into the Belizean custody and his filing of his next whatever, whatever lawyers do.
Uh, and three hours in which they could return me to police.
He said, I can't do anything.
It's in your hands.
I said, I understand.
And, uh, 10 minutes before noon, I had a heart attack at three o'clock.
I felt better and that was the end.
All right.
So now you're back home.
Um, I do want to ask this.
You, I know you had a home down there.
You probably had a lot of money in the bank.
You probably had, Well, I don't know what you had down there, but a lot, I'm sure.
When you went to Belize, did you think that you were going to Belize to live, you know, forevermore, or at least... You know, actually I did.
You know, I was at the age, I thought, retiring, settling down and enjoying life.
In a warm, sunny place would be fantastic.
So I had all of my assets there.
I had houses and condos and it was foolish.
Again, old men sometimes turn foolish no matter how intelligent they appear to be.
Is all that lost?
Pardon?
Is all that lost?
Everything.
Of course.
I came out with a shirt on my back.
Wow.
Here's something I truly believe.
I think that That money is fairly easy to make.
It's hard to hold on to, but easy to make if you do what you love and you put your full heart and mind into it.
So, you know, I'm not remotely concerned about my future and I've given up any hope of collecting anything back from Belize and just continuing my life.
There is no possibility Belize can come and get you somehow, right?
Well, I mean, not legally, of course.
Again, I'm not charged with anything.
In America, I'm a good tax-paying citizen.
In fact, I've paid way more taxes than most people, I'm afraid.
And there's no reason for America to do anything.
The police is not going to charge me with anything.
They have no evidence.
And the police continue to say we have no evidence linking McAfee to the murder.
We merely want to question him.
Do you have any idea...
I'm sorry, do you have any idea who killed your neighbor, John?
Yeah, I really don't.
You know, by the way, the assaults on rich foreigners in police is not an uncommon thing, by the way.
It happens all the time.
I have no idea.
He lived alone, and he was very wealthy.
He had no security guards, which if it had been me, I would have had.
So, it could have been anything, a robbery, who knows.
Okay, but I guess your attitude at that point was, look, they want me, they've already come after me, any excuse at all to get me is what they will use, and so when you found out they wanted to question you, it was Hey, I'm out of here, or I'm toast, kind of, right?
That was it, and I truly believe that.
I believe that to this day, that I would definitely have been toast.
I'm not toast.
They would have put me in a prison and renewed the questioning order, you know, indefinitely.
Again and again, alright.
Again and again.
Since you're in this business, it is really important, I feel, that I ask you about the NSA snooping that's been revealed.
So, you don't have a radio on in the background, do you, John?
That's right.
I'm hearing some sort of echo, that's weird.
Anyway, NSA listens to virtually everything, emails, phone calls, I guess everything, and it seems like such a Fourth Amendment direct violation to me that I thought I would get you to comment on it yourself.
How do you feel about it?
Well, you know, first of all, Art, it's not just the NSA.
Keep in mind there are 17 covert agencies within the U.S.
government.
There's the NSA, the CIA, the FBI.
There are the various Army intelligence operations.
And believe me, if one is spying on us, do you think the others are not?
Of course they are.
And so the issue goes way beyond just one agency that seems to be a rogue agency, because they're no more rogue than any other.
They have the technology, so does the CIA.
They have the need, they think, so does the CIA and others.
So I believe it's more widespread than we know.
We know about the NSA because of Edward Snowden.
We need a light person in all the other agencies, and I think the truth will come to light.
So the problem is magnitude.
It is magnified by the number of agencies that I believe are snooping on us.
Number two, I... Let me ask about Snowden before it gets away from me.
The obvious, always asked question.
Hero or traitor?
Or something in between?
I mean, if he had done what he did and then just turned himself in and said, okay, here, Tough me, it would have been one thing, but then off to Communist China, off to Russia.
Well, here's the issue.
I don't think he went to Communist China, he went to Hong Kong, which, well it's true, it is Communist China now.
It really is, yes.
Yes, you're right.
But here's the issue.
He did us all a favor, did he not?
The general public.
Let's forget about, let's separate government from citizen.
Didn't he?
He told us something that we needed to know, right?
From that standpoint, he was a hero.
Now, having done that, what would you have him do?
I mean, the government would, of course, want him to turn himself in.
But as someone who's done me a favor, I just wish him well.
It's hard to say.
For the law enforcement agency, well, he's a criminal.
But he did a heroic thing.
I'm guessing he would have been questioned for many cycles of 20 hours.
I'm sure he would have been.
And it may not have been pleasant.
And in spite of all of the Geneva Conventions that the U.S.
has signed, I do not believe that torture is absent within our government.
So, in any case, I wish him well.
It was a mistake going to Russia, however.
I would not have done that.
Right.
Let's see where to go with you now there's so much well you're working on something that if it works and if you're allowed to market it would thwart agencies like the NSA and as you mentioned perhaps many others from spying on us.
How far along are you?
Well, we're pretty far along with the design.
You mentioned something about, will the U.S.
allow me to make it?
That's a very, very deep question right now.
Keep in mind that there are many rationales that the government uses for stopping progress.
One is, well, it could be used for ill will.
It could be used by criminals.
It could be used for negative purposes.
That's true, because if it's that secret, then criminals could use it to pass criminal information.
However, people use the telephone for the same thing.
We don't get rid of telephones.
It's questionable, but the world is large.
If I can't sell it here, I'll sell it there.
Actually, I think you'll be able to sell it everywhere, black market or otherwise.
You'll get out there.
I think it's needed.
I mean, it annoys me.
To think that everything that I do, everywhere that I go, even in the privacy of my home, perhaps, that someone could be watching me.
That simply is not a pleasant situation for the American citizen to be in, and we're all in that situation.
Well, we are, and in fact, is it not possible, John, to remotely turn on cameras, perhaps in computers, perhaps in Telephones, or whatever.
In other words, are our gadgets possibly our enemies?
Well, of course.
In fact, it's very trivial.
Anyone can buy keystroke logging software, which is software that, if you could surreptitiously put it on someone's computer, it will then quietly monitor every keystroke that the user puts in.
You can also have the camera turned on, or the microphone.
And then you give it an address and it will send all that information to you.
You can buy that off the shelf.
People are not aware of how easy it is to spy.
So if we can buy it, then you know the NSA, the CIA have techniques of putting it into our systems without even coming into our home or coming in contact with us.
So yes, and that's a very scary thing.
I don't leave my laptop open.
For example, I close it when I'm not using it.
But many people leave the laptop open all the time.
Here's another thing, Art.
If you use, for example, the Bank of America banking application, when you agree to terms, you need to read the terms.
Because one of the terms is, the bank says, we will use your camera and your telephone services, and you're giving us permission.
We do not have to tell you when we're doing it from now on.
Now, I understand why.
For the Bank of America, let's assume you're doing online banking, and you empty your account, and then you say, oh, it wasn't me.
Someone stole my phone.
They can say, well, look, it looks like you're here.
We have a picture of you.
They really can do that?
And they are doing that?
They are doing it.
So check it out.
Download the app and check it out.
On every Android phone, the Bank of America app, it specifically, no one reads the terms and conditions.
No one.
But if you dig into it, it'll say, you give us the right to use your camera at any time we choose, and to use your phone services, meaning they can call in and out any time we choose, because they have to send the picture to themselves, right?
If you're in bed with some girl that you want to impress, and you say, honey, look at this, look at the kind of money I've got stocked away in the bank.
Right, so the bank is for sure, if you're moving money around, it's for sure going to take a photograph.
You're not going to know it.
Wonderful.
You know, and it's the first response of everybody.
And specifically, we do not have to tell you when we're doing it.
Oh God.
And you know, everybody's first response is, look, I'm not doing anything wrong.
If the NSA wants to read my boring crap, well, have at it.
Or, for that matter, my picture of the Bank of America is welcome to it.
But that's not really a good response, is it?
Well, no, of course not.
It's not that we have things to hide.
It's that we still need privacy.
You don't want people sitting in your bedroom while you're making love to your wife or your spouse.
You don't want people watching when you're giving very heartfelt advice to one of your children about some deep issue in life.
I mean, good Lord, we have to have privacy.
And it doesn't matter if we have nothing to hide.
Believe me, the people who say that, they're lying to themselves.
Everybody has something to hide.
They really do.
Not because it's illegal or bad, but because It just shouldn't be shared with the world.
So, I'm sorry, I have to disagree with that.
Right, okay.
You had something to hide.
Now, you're not hiding it any longer.
I guess when you were younger, you were writing software like crazy and dealing drugs, right?
Yes, I was.
And I'm not hiding that, by the way.
No, that's right.
You're not.
That's what I'm saying.
You're not hiding it.
I'm aware of it, so obviously you're not hiding it.
How did you make that work?
You know, I developed, I think, an extraordinarily high tolerance to drugs and alcohol.
You know, I'm Irish and come from a family of drinkers and drugs were easy to add on to that for myself.
It was the age of drugs when I was growing up.
I just managed it.
I always managed to pull off the jobs.
I always managed to actually get ahead and get promoted, up to the point that it all collapsed.
It took many years for that to happen.
When it collapsed, I lost everything.
My wife, my friends, my job, my self-respect.
It's called hitting bottom.
So in other words, you've hit bottom a couple times, a few times now.
Well, I think only once, and that was with the drugs and alcohol.
I don't think I'm hitting bottom.
I was perfectly confident and in my right body and mind the whole time.
I basically lost everything.
I had a clash with a world government and came out alive.
I don't think I'm hitting bottom.
I think that's the success of the sub-measure.
You're right.
What I meant to say is that you've lost everything.
You said you lost life and so forth and so on.
I guess you hit bottom with drugs, but you did lose everything in Belize.
My goodness, house and money.
I did not lose my self-respect or my will or anything else.
I'm still working and smiling and doing as I always did.
You're right.
I lost money and property.
It sounds like you're doing what you love, and that's really what counts.
I think everybody should.
If you do what you love, you will succeed, no matter how that's defined.
If you don't do what you love, you're just going to be miserable.
Right now, we are probably at risk, John.
We have power grids across America.
We have things run by computers.
Even our stoplights are run by computers.
Everything is.
There have been movies made about this recently.
Terrorists getting control of things here in America and causing a mini Armageddon of sorts.
Is that possible in your estimation?
Well, absolutely.
Keep in mind we're in the age of communication.
You don't even have to be present.
You can be sitting in Iran.
Oh, by the way, the first computer virus was called the Pakistani Pray because it was created by two brothers in Pakistan, a town called Lahore.
But in any case, you can be situated anywhere.
If you have access to the Internet, you can hack into anything that you like if you know how to hack in and you have the correct techniques and the correct software.
So yes, everything, the power grid you mentioned, Thousands of computers flood the power grid.
I'm not sure what the security measures are, but believe me, no matter how tight your security is, there is still the human factor.
There's always the chance of, you know, a man meeting the right woman who happens to be an agent and falls in love and trusts her, and the next thing you know, she has his passwords and the power grid is down.
Or you could just leave a telephone or anything that was something interesting on it.
As soon as they pick it up and dial, it's calling home and you're in again.
It's so easy using the human element to hack into systems.
Hackers and hackers no longer use sophisticated software techniques.
It's always the human element.
So, everything is vulnerable because human beings are not perfect creatures.
We all have greed and lust and envy and all the things that allow us to be manipulated by others.
Speaking of things that aren't working quite right and hacking, we come to the health care website for the President.
There, just in the last day or so, John, there have been reports of hackers getting information from the new healthcare website.
Well, I predicted that and it's very easy to do.
As I said, there are no checks and balances to ensure That a website is a legitimate agent or examiner website.
So I could set one up, give it a fancy name, and offer cut rates, and people would log on, give their social security numbers, their birth date, all the information a person needs to empty their bank accounts.
And it's going to happen more and more often.
Keep in mind, very few people have signed up yet for Obamacare, so imagine if millions had done so.
That's right.
The cost to the consumers in identity theft is going to be many, many times the savings of Obamacare or the cost of implementing that system.
How hard, in your estimation, is this going to be to fix, John?
Well, it depends on what you mean fix.
A person could make it run in a couple of months, but it's not fixed.
It will be so full of holes.
That the security will be even worse.
The architecture is simply not sound.
The basic structure of the software is not sound.
It needs to be thrown out and start over.
But, you know, the administration said by the end of November, we'll have it up and running.
Well, sure, that would be easy to do if you have a system that doesn't crash and allows you to log on.
However, it's going to be so easy that the fact that a child could do it.
It sounds as though you should be employed by the administration.
I suppose that's probably not going to happen now, but it sounds like you could fix it up.
Well, you know, possibly.
It's not a job I would take, though.
It would be nightmarish.
The political problems, the time schedules, it's simply not something I would like to do.
You mentioned the architecture.
It's my understanding the site downloads a very great deal of information to you, which is a bulky, difficult thing to do, particularly with a lot of people's Wi-Fi connections or whatever.
It just doesn't work very well.
No, it's absurd.
It's like trying to force the ocean to empty itself through a one-inch drain pipe.
It just simply can't happen.
And it didn't have to be that way.
They did that so that the processing, in other words, you needed fewer computers on the government server side to do the work, because they're using your computer to do work.
But that's a tiny savings compared to the tremendous loss that you get by having all the data transfer.
It's actually called a denial of service attack, when a system is flooded with so many requests that it cannot respond.
And it's doing it to itself.
It's very bizarre.
By the way, is it being helped, do you know offhand?
In other words, is there an external denial of service attack going on in concert with the poor coding that has happened?
To my knowledge, no.
I mean, the only people who would do that are groups like Anonymous, the Anonymous hackers group, and they always announce the fact.
So I don't think so.
They don't need to because it is really, it's thrashing itself.
I've never seen anything quite like it.
From a programming standpoint and an intellectual standpoint, it's quite fascinating.
But it's not workable.
Well, we certainly live in a new day and age now.
I marvel at it all the time.
And I wonder if it's a good day and age.
In other words, We are so consumed by our computers, by our... I've got a, you know, iPhone 5 on my side, and you can spend an awful lot of time in them.
It seems to me people are spending so much time with them, John, that there is very little personal, social interaction going on.
Well, there's almost none.
If you look at husbands and wives, when they're eating, they're not looking at each other, they're looking at their cell phones.
And even in bars, you know, where there's usually good cheer and laughter and storytelling, you know, I've walked through some that the entire crowd is looking at their cell phones.
I mean, you could take everybody's pocket or walk behind the counter and steal the cash and don't even notice.
This is not healthy.
Not healthy for our society and not healthy for the individual.
How to fix this?
I do not know.
But people will text someone that they could easily talk to.
Even somebody on the other side of the room, it's incredible.
Right, it's very strange.
So this needs to change, or we will become so isolated that life will become totally different than you and I know it.
Listen, I'm intensely interested in what you are developing to try and thwart those who would look, listen, and otherwise intrude into our lives.
How close to being done are you?
Well, you know, we'll have a prototype in about six months, a prototype meaning proof of concept.
It will be probably a year before we start selling.
And it will be a hard sell because the first person to buy one can't use it because there's nobody else who has one.
So, we need, you know, a fairly good peppering of devices in any specific area for it to be useful.
But I think that will happen fairly quickly.
Is this kind of a modern PGP?
Yeah, it's more than just privacy.
Yeah, it's pretty good privacy is sort of an encryption algorithm.
But this is an encryption algorithm and a network which is not defined.
It's completely undefined and changes constantly.
And so the file transfers, the data transfers cannot be traced.
You don't know where a file came from.
You don't know who got the file that you put in your public space.
If you do send an email to someone, like you want to send a juicy email to your spouse or your lover, No one can ever read it, because no one knows where it came from or where it's going to.
It's a very unique system.
You've gone on the wrong side of the Belize authorities.
It seems to me this device is just bound to get you on the wrong side of the authorities here.
Well, you know, not by actually building it.
I mean, unless they say, you can't build it, and if you do, we're going to put you in jail.
I mean, it will take a lot of people off, Art, of course.
It's going to take off the music industry and the movie industry, and certainly the covert agencies within the government.
But, you know, what can they do other than audit me every year?
And they will.
Yeah, that's unpleasant.
I know.
I've had that happen.
When you get to our age, John, when you get to our age, you know, at some certain point, you say, bring it on.
Right.
That's my attitude now.
Bring it on.
You know, it'll make my life interesting in my declining years, at least.
So there you have it.
Well, at least here, John, you remember you can say, I want a lawyer, right?
Hold tight, we'll be right back.
We've got one more segment to do.
John McAfee is my guest.
I'm sure you've seen a lot about John or read about him.
Fascinating stuff.
Fascinating guy.
We'll be right back.
My guest is John McAfee.
Really a cool guy.
Wish we had more time with him.
John, I'm going to ask you a question that you might want to consider really hard as you answer.
Because I'm not sure of the answer myself.
When I was a child, I could have answered this easily.
The question is, is America now, in your estimation, the greatest country in the world or not?
Well, you know, that's sort of putting me on the spot here.
It was certainly the greatest country in the world when I was a boy, without a shadow of a doubt.
It was post-war America, and large cars with fins, and everything was possible, and the world was infinite.
It has certainly changed.
Is it the greatest country in the world?
I don't have much to compare it against.
It is certainly preferable to Belize.
I think we've lost a lot.
We've lost our competitive edge.
We've lost privacy.
What we've gained is fear.
We have lost a lot of personal freedoms.
We used to be able to go on an airplane and fly wherever we wanted and get off.
Now you have to get halfway undressed and stand in line to be scanned.
That's right.
The country was founded on the principle, give us your poor, your disenfranchised.
Now it's impossible for someone to get into America if you're from outside the country.
It's changed.
It's different and it's not comfortable for me.
That's the best answer I can give you.
Well, I guess I can read pretty carefully between those lines.
Do you think that it would be a good idea for the American people when they're young to, for one reason or another, get the hell out of the country for a while and experience another country before coming home?
Absolutely.
That's one of the things that we do less of than almost any other developed country, is travel.
Of course, America is a large, beautiful place, and there's a lot to see here.
Grand Canyon, Rocky Mountains, two oceans.
But really, until we see how other people live in their daily lives, the way their governments are structured, their transportation system, their food, We can't really appreciate or disappreciate our own country.
And also, when Americans travel, unlike other countries, we expect everybody to be American and to speak English and to accommodate to our needs.
But the world doesn't work that way.
The Japanese don't come over here and expect us to speak Japanese.
Neither do the Russians or anyone else.
They take the good graces to learn the language and try to speak it no matter how poorly.
We don't do that.
We have an arrogance which is not deserved.
Do you think we've become soft, John?
You're the same age I am, so you can kind of look at it and judge for yourself.
Again, I go back to the Philippines.
That's where I was.
Those people can be completely flooded.
Their families are waist-deep or neck-deep in water.
And, John, when the cameras come around, you know, to show the terrible tragedy, they smile and wave at the camera.
They're happy people no matter what!
Because they're still alive.
They're still breathing.
They understand the value of that.
Here, you know, in America, If you're online in a chat room and someone types something unpleasant to you, you might complain about it for hours.
I mean, that's the difference here.
We have had life too good, too plentiful, too cushy for too long, and it can't last forever.
And so I think we are unprepared as a society For the real world, as it is experienced by other people, like the Philippines.
Any third world country.
The poverty.
I've never been to the Philippines, but in Belize and Central America, poverty is endemic.
There's not a child below the middle class that has not suffered hunger at some point in their life.
Even at the point of losing their hair.
Very common.
That doesn't happen in America.
Nobody goes hungry here, really.
Even the street people, we throw away food from restaurants that would feed an army.
So, we've had it too good.
And I think a healthy dose of reality is in store for us.
Well, John, we recently got very close to default in this country.
They weren't crazy enough to let it happen yet, but it could happen in the future.
And I realize that about half the American people get a check every month from the government.
And if we did go to default, and all those checks were to stop, all the social security checks, all the helping you one way or the other checks, the disability checks, the you-name-it checks, if they all stopped, I wonder how long things would remain civil.
What do you think, John?
Well, I don't think it would remain civil for long, and I think the incivility would be extreme.
I think that there would be an uprising of the first magnitude.
But, you know, here's another thing about default.
It's not just the fact that half of us are supporting the other half, and then both of us are supporting the government, which is rapidly becoming the other half.
It's the fact that what do we produce anymore that people really want?
We used to produce steel.
Everything of value in the world was produced in America.
Now, who makes your computer?
Mostly we produce information.
That's it, information.
Well, information, you can't eat it, and it won't drive you to the store, and it will not keep the rain off your head, which is what life ultimately boils down to when the shit hits the fan, if you'll excuse my vernacular.
So, right, we do produce information, but the real production, the building of goods, the manufacturing of things that we need, it's not elsewhere.
I wonder how Americans are going to take it when they begin seeing the headlines that China's now number one in this and number one in that and so forth and so on.
I think not well.
Well, you know, I tell you what, did you see the Olympics in China?
Did you watch that show?
I did, indeed.
Now, the opening ceremony, I mean, can you possibly imagine us trying to pull that off?
We just couldn't.
It was too magnificent, too perfect.
It was so beyond our capability that at that point I go, whoa, we better learn Chinese because these people are up and coming.
That's right.
All right, we're very short on time because that's all you gave us, so I'm going to ask this.
You've had a really, really interesting life, John.
What would you say has been the greatest joy in life for you?
Oh, well, that's a trippy one.
My greatest joy is in being able to communicate and commune with other people.
People like me, people dis-unlike me.
The young, the old, just communing with people is not what it's all about, really.
What would life be if you were in solitary confinement, no matter how big your confinement was?
Forever.
What value would you have?
I mean, I know we all should love ourselves, and I do, but we need people, we need to commune, we need to contact and play and have fun with humanity, our own species.
And we're not doing enough of that these days.
What a wonderful interview.
Short, but wonderful this has been, John.
I really, really want to thank you for coming on the program, and I hope sometime When you're in a nice, relaxed state, you can give us more time because there's a million questions I could ask.
I would be happy to, Art.
The reason I limited it to an hour is I have so many interviews this week that I don't even have time to sleep.
But I would love to do a more extensive interview with you at a later date.
Let's do that.
John McAfee, thank you.
Thank you, sir.
All right.
Well, wasn't that something?
John McAfee is something.
He's quite a guy, and I'm sure there will be many diverse opinions out there about Mr. McAfee, but I'm glad I had an opportunity to speak with him.
Coming up now, you know, even though I talk about scary things on the show, right?
It's that kind of show.
We talk about scary stuff.
Nothing quite scares me right now as much as Fukushima.
I think Fukushima is a possible Armageddon.
Not a complete Armageddon, but one bad enough that you'll call it Armageddon.
And I will too.
Coming up is Paul Gunter.
And he is the lead spokesperson in nuclear reactor hazards and security concerns.
He acts as the regulatory watchdog over the U.S.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the nuclear power industry.
He is a 2008 recipient of the Jane Bagley Lehman Award from the Tides Foundation for Environmental Activism for his work on nuclear power and climate change.
He has appeared on NBC Nightly World News, The Lerner News Hour, BBC World News, and Amy Goodman's Democracy Now!
He is co-founder of the Anti-Nuclear Clamshell Alliance in 1976 to oppose the construction of the Seabrook nuclear power plant through non-violent direct action that launched the U.S.
anti-nuclear movement.
Prior to joining Beyond Nuclear, he served for 16 years as the director of the Reactor Watchdog Project for Nuclear Information and Resource Hey, good evening.
Welcome.
Thank you.
activist and energy policy analyst he has been an ardent critic of atomic power
and our development for more than thirty years paul is a new englander
was born in mississippi he was raised in detroit michigan here is paul gutter
i thought k good evening
welcome thank you have i've i've uh... really look forward being on
your show at some point so i'm
really happy it happened i'm happy it has to and i had another nuclear expert on
recently who was a very
very nice guy but frankly it was uh... pretty much pro nuclear industry
and i almost had the feeling a few times during the interview
that uh... if his own basement had been on fire uh... he would have suggested to me that it was uh... not
good but uh... that not all that bad either and it was ok where he was there in
the living room In other words, he was kind of on their side, and I take it I'm going to hear the other side tonight.
Fukushima scares me, Paul.
Right.
I've been involved with this issue since 1975, and so we've seen a steady decline.
What started out as too cheap to meter is now too expensive to matter.
You know, what was originally described as the peaceful atom, we have saber-rattling all through the Middle East right now, where Iran, who is the signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has said they want to pursue nuclear power for peaceful purposes.
But everybody knows that uranium is the flip side of a coin, Where on one side it's nuclear power and the other side it's nuclear weapons.
They are inextricably linked.
If you spread nuclear power globally, you proliferate nuclear weapons.
That's the basics.
Now we have an aging industry that's wearing thin, it's cracking, it's eroding.
Fukushima was 40 years old.
when an extraordinary event happened on March 11, 2011 at 2.46pm, 80 miles off the shore of Japan,
we had a tremendous earthquake, nine magnitude. And the first shockwave
was traveling at three to four miles per minute. And And it, um, but, you know, really that's the primary wave of an earthquake.
But there was actually even a quicker wave that preceded it that was picked up on the coast of Japan eight seconds after the earthquake started.
And then we had the secondary wave moving at half that speed You know, one and a half miles per minute, but it eventually got to Fukushima and the coast of Japan in a very violent shockwave that crumbled buildings and I think, most importantly, it toppled electrical lines.
along the coast that provide 100% of the power for all safety systems at the six units that were there at Fukushima Daiichi, which is a 1960s vintage.
These are the Model Ts of the nuclear age.
Some of the first reactors Certainly the oldest reactors operating today, we've got 23 of these Fukushima-style reactors operating here in the United States that are practically identical, and then there's 8 others that are very close.
We have about 31 of these, they're called General Electric Mark 1 boiling water reactors, and a Mark 2 for this other design.
But we've known since 1972 that if these reactors were subjected to a severe accident that the containment would fail.
The, you know, originally it was the Atomic Energy Commission in a letter in September of 1972 from Dr. Steven Anauer, who is a senior safety advisor to the Atomic Energy Commission.
And He said then that these GE reactors, like Fukushima, like Oyster Creek up in New Jersey, like Dresden in Illinois, they're all over the place.
He said that the containments are too small and that they would be subjected to overpressure, overtemperature, and fail fairly quickly.
And he was told by his boss Joseph Hendry, that he didn't necessarily disagree with him, but if they carried this forward, it would mean the end of nuclear power in 1972.
These are documents that are from the Atomic Energy Commission.
This is the conversation that was going on then, and Dr. Anauer told his boss, we should stop Building these things, and we should discourage the use of these GE reactors.
And the answer was?
This will spill the end of nuclear power, and they ignored him, and the United States went on to build 16 more of these GE Mark 1 reactors and the 8 Mark 2 reactors.
And of course, right around this time is when Fukushima, when Tokyo Electric Power Company started to build its own set of GE boiling water reactors there at Fukushima Daiichi.
There are five of these Mark 1s and one Mark 2.
Six units there.
And typically, This industry is notorious for taking shortcuts, but I think that the one shortcut that everybody regrets, and will regret for history to come, is that Tokyo Electric Power Company shaved 80 feet off of the bluff that they built Fukushima Daiichi on.
So on March 11, 2011, a 50-foot tsunami Came in.
And broke open the doors to those units.
Particularly units 1 through 4 into the turbine halls.
Right.
And flooded the electrical systems.
Just a short time after, all the electrical power was lost from the off-site power.
Then the tsunami came in and Then flooded the electrical systems and drowned 13 emergency diesel generators that were operating in the basement.
Can you please restate that?
The wall was how high?
It was a 50 foot high tsunami.
No, no, no.
The wall itself was originally designed to be how high?
Well, Fukushima Daiichi is built on a bluff, you know, and in order to accommodate Tokyo Electric Power Company to make the machinery to build these reactors easier, to make it easier to pump water, to make it less expensive to provide the cooling system for these six reactors, They shaved 80 feet off of the bluff, and they brought the reactor down.
They removed the natural tsunami barrier that was there, and they predicted in this, you know, cost-benefit action, so that they could shave some costs off their construction, they predicted that the maximum tsunami would only be 10 feet tall.
Now, we've got those kinds of assumptions.
If that 80 feet was still there at the time of the tsunami, would that plant have withstood the earthquake?
Very, very likely.
Wow.
The tsunami would have been below.
But, I mean, there was still, you know, we don't, again, we're not quite sure what initiated The whole accident, that's still being studied, will be studied for decades, but... It's going to be lack of electric power, right?
The loss of off-site power, there could have been large break pipes in the facility from the earthquake, but the killer was when that tsunami came in and wiped out the backup emergency diesel generators, they only had eight hours of Backup from battery systems.
I mean, there are backups to backups to backups in nuclear power.
Apparently not quite enough.
These failed within the first day.
And on March 11th, at least we know Unit 1 uncovered the reactor core.
The water level dropped and exposed the top of the reactor fuel.
And then the zirconium cladding that makes up these fuel assemblies.
You know, it's a very strong alloy.
But if you powder zirconium, it's a flash powder for flash bulbs.
It's used in high explosives.
If it catches fire, it burns with what they call an exothermic reaction, so that it can chemically separate out Uh, water into an explosive environment of hydrogen and oxygen.
It just looks for a spark at that point.
So when, um, you know, I mean, basically it started out when they lost the offsite power.
We had with a condition called all control rods in or scram as it's referred to in the industries.
And they were scrammed right away.
It worked, is according to plan and design.
And so they began shutting down, but you don't just shut down a reactor like you turn off a light.
There's tremendous amounts of heat, residual heat, even after the control rods have inserted into these You have to remove that heat, otherwise you begin this fuel damage.
And once the pumps and motors for the cooling system lost offsite power, lost onsite emergency power, and then the lights began to dim as the emergency battery systems were spent, The water levels started to drop quickly, and then the reactor fuel started to overheat.
It started generating lots of temperature, lots of pressure, lots of hydrogen gas.
The workers were trying to control these conditions, but they were doing it often in a control room that was dark with flashlights.
They were bringing in auto batteries from the from the parking lot to try to plug systems in, and it was a desperate time.
I'll tell you what, I'll tell you what.
Paul, hold it right there.
We have to take a couple of breaks an hour anyway.
Paul Gunter is my guest, and we're describing, actually, the meltdown.
I'm Art Bell, and you're listening to Dark Matter Raging in the Night.
Hi, everybody.
My guest is Paul Gunter, and we are discussing, you know, I don't know what we're discussing.
A possible Armageddon.
Something going on on Earth right now.
Yes, there was a nine-point earthquake, and yes, Fukushima, the Daiichi nuclear plant at Fukushima, or plants, actually, melted down.
You know, the China Syndrome stuff, it really actually melted down, and I don't want to interrupt you, Paul.
You're describing the process, and not only would I like you to describe the whole process that occurred, but keep going and virtually, in process, bring us up to date with where we are with Fukushima now, and we've got plenty of time.
This is a long-form talk radio, so I want the details.
So, we were at the point where we were melting.
Well, you know, Art, first of all, I want to really express my gratitude for being on your show where the guests aren't reduced to soundbites.
I mean, we actually have an opportunity now to discuss and illuminate the complexity and the long history.
I mean, Fukushima did not occur By some extreme natural event, if you go back to the Japanese diet, the diet being the Japanese Congress, they did a report on Fukushima Daiichi, and they called it a man-made disaster that resulted from the collusion of government, regulator, and industry
To advance the financial interests of the nuclear industry.
And that there, there in Japan, they coined the term nuclear regulatory capture, which I find eerie because that acronym is NRC, which is like, you know, our Nuclear Regulatory Commission and, and we're So, that accident began not on March 11th, but it began with the capture of the government and the regulator by an industry that is linked to the most powerful corporations that combine military and electricity
And they've done this since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
The military-industrial complex.
I want to drop something in, Paul, and that is, I think I'm typical of many Americans.
I recall when Chernobyl happened.
I'm 68 years old.
I remember it.
It was scary.
I remember all the poisoning that went on, all the milk.
It was horrible.
Anyway, I remember Chernobyl.
Years passed, Paul, and I'm also very much aware of the need we have for power.
And I guess Chernobyl began to fade.
Three Mile Island wasn't a full-blown disaster.
And by the way, I was within miles of Three Mile Island when that happened.
And I recall the lies they told.
And they did, boy, they lied their butts off about Three Mile Island.
Chernobyl began to fade in my memory and I think in the memory of many Americans and after all it was a single containment they said and the Russians didn't do it very well they said and so you know that kind of thing just can't happen elsewhere because well we build safe plants and so it just can't happen.
Well, I sure did get a wake-up call here recently with Fukushima.
Anyway, here we are, and the fuel is beginning to melt.
There's no water to circulate because we don't have any power to make the water circulate.
So this melting begins, right?
Right.
And again, the melting, while the fuel, the uranium, this enriched uranium, Is overheating from the fissioning process that's now lost its cooling capability.
It's also generating this explosive environment of hydrogen gas and oxygen.
And that's, you know, let me just back up for one second, though, because I was called into the studio of CNN in Washington, D.C.
on March 11th.
While this was happening, while the fuel is overheating and starting to melt, I get a call from a producer at CNN that says, come on in, we want you to talk about the Fukushima Daiichi accident and what you're concerned about.
And they got me into this little studio with Gene Meserve.
It was a studio no bigger than a closet, and I've got this camera in my face, and she says, you know, look, Just in the simplest terms, tell us what you're concerned about.
Right.
And if you go to that archive from March 11th on CNN Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, you see me cut in to say, well, our concern is that this reactor could literally blow its roof off.
And it wasn't that I was a psychic or precognizant or Anything.
It was that we knew that this reactor was never designed for severe accident, no matter what they tell you.
And sure enough, at 336 the next day, Unit 1 exploded.
Right.
Hydrogen, right?
It was the hydrogen, it was, you know, the actual containment system for the Mark 1 is It's what they call a pressure suppression system.
It's one-sixth the size of the Three Mile Island containment.
So it's a fraction of the volume, but they fill it.
It's an inverted light bulb structure of steel, one and a half inches thick.
The reactor vessel sits inside that inverted light bulb.
Then there are sets of large diameter pipes that run off that, what's called the dry well,
that inverted light bulb structure.
It's 90 feet tall.
These large diameter pipes then run into an 18 foot diameter donut shape that's filled
with a million gallons of water.
And all that steam and heat and pressure is driven from the reactor pressure vessel and
vented into the dry well and then driven into this wet well, this million gallon full donut
shape.
And there, the pressure and the steam are supposed to be quenched and contained.
It's a containment.
That's what they call it.
But we knew that it would never do this.
And so they lost power, they overheated the fuel, and then on March 12th we have Unit 1 explode, on March 14th at 11am we get Unit 3 exploding, and then on March 15th at 6am Unit 2 explodes, and then 20 minutes later Unit 4 explodes.
From these hydrogen gas generations.
The radiation now is just rising quickly.
There are areas of that plant where if you were there a few hours, you're dead.
We've actually got transcript from the U.S.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission from their meetings in July of 2011 in their review where they identify that fuel fragments two inches long were found more than a mile away from those react from that reactor site.
So we didn't we had more than just hydrogen gas.
We had core material ejected From those, or one of those reactors, one or more of those reactors.
You also got to understand that this GE design situates its nuclear waste from the reactor core in a pool that sits above the reactor containment system, so it's above and outside.
Unit 4 had about 400 tons of high-level nuclear waste, essentially irradiated nuclear fuel, that was sitting in a pool, literally in the reactor building's attic.
It's my understanding, Paul, that With regard to number four, they're about to embark on attempting to lift these fuel rods out of the location they're in now, with I guess some kind of crane apparatus or something, and actually remove them.
And there are how many pounds or tons of rods up there?
About 400 tons.
400 tons?
Yeah.
My God, it's also my understanding, Paul, that if these are, this has to be done by hand.
In other words, computers and automated stuff can't do it.
It's going to be a human operation.
You know, you can't remove the human touch and likewise, you can't remove human error from these kinds of operations.
The explosion at Unit 4 wrecked the heavy load crane.
That was there for moving the fuel out of the reactor vessel into the pool and moving new fuel out of the pool into the reactor vessel.
You know, that's that's the purpose of, you know, the elevated storage pond is there to accommodate smooth functioning to maintain The operation of the reactor, so it's the shortest distance between two points through a fuel channel.
But the explosion blew the top off the reactor, and it wrecked the heavy load crane, which fell onto the top.
So right now, starting in November, we've probably got the most dangerous game of pick-up sticks that's ever been
played or contemplated.
These ones being radioactive and also the explosion may very well have
damaged some of the fuel and also the array could be askew.
Is it true, Paul, that if one of these or many of these are exposed to the air
they could well catch fire and worse?
Is that correct?
Yes.
Okay.
That's the concern.
If what's holding these rods right now were to collapse, and I'm hearing that that is a possibility, they're considering that collapse.
If that collapse occurred, Paul, what would be the result?
I hesitate to even spell it out.
Again, we're talking about not just a single unit.
We're talking about six units.
We're talking about a common pool there on the site for all six units.
This is a very old nuclear power plant.
There's lots of nuclear waste.
In that, you know, we've got three reactors, the cores have left the vessel, they've burned through the bottom of the vessel.
We don't really know where they are because it's the radioactive environment even fries robots that TEPCO has been trying to send in there.
Really?
I had never heard that.
Yep, they have been sending Very innovative robotic machinery, sensors in there to get a picture, to get a reading, and these things don't return.
I mean, we have opened a door to hell that cannot be easily closed, if ever.
And this is, you know, so we've got those three cores that are melting.
They could be somewhere in the concrete base mat.
burning their way through.
They could have already burned through and entered into the ground.
They hopefully have formed a huge solid elephant foot of highly radioactive material that's cooled down in there, but we don't know.
Paul, I'm sorry to interrupt.
Do you mean that even with robotic help, they don't know where the cores are?
Correct.
So we've got three, we've got three molten cores that we don't have a status report on.
We've also got, in all six of these reactors, you know, five and six by the way, are, they didn't, they were on higher ground.
They also managed to keep one of the emergency diesel generators above the tsunami and so we didn't have accidents at five and six but we still got lots of nuclear waste there.
The concern is that if we have another severe earthquake, we just had a 7.3 earthquake there the other day, Friday, But the potential is there for another, and that was a moderate earthquake.
There was no damage, but we were on pins and needles.
But if we get another nine, for example, Reactor Unit 4, not only did the explosion remove the roof, but the building is leaning.
It damaged the walls, the support structure for this elevated storage pond with 400 tons of nuclear waste.
And it's leaning.
And they've been, and Tokyo Electric Power Company's gone in there and they've engineered, you know, a shoring up operation.
But the underpinnings of this incredible amount of nuclear waste is damaged.
And there's no, there's no Patchwork that's going to remove the risk of that building collapsing and all of that nuclear waste then falling out onto the ground, catching fire, burning in an open atmospheric pall of radioactive material that becomes, that prohibits any further human activity on that site.
And then you begin a cascading of a deterioration that then involves potentially all six units and that common storage pond.
And this is the scenario that Prime Minister Nato Kan saw in the early days, where he set into motion the planning process for evacuating 35 million people from Tokyo.
So if that hits the ground and these rods are exposed and they're burning, what does that mean for Japan and what does that mean for the world?
You know, it's all going to be a matter of which way the wind is blowing at that point.
Well, this would be ongoing for a long time, right?
The winds would blow one way, and then they'd blow another, and then another.
That's correct.
And so, something like this could burn for a very long time.
I mean, it could be permanent.
Yes.
Permanent as in hundreds or thousands of years?
Certainly, you know, it would, we don't know, you know, exactly, certainly the consequence would be permanent.
But, you know, the, so, you know, once, even after the fire goes out in one of these catastrophes, these little fires spread, and they spread like Hot particles.
Microscopic particles that we've already detected through laboratory results in auto filters in Washington and Oregon.
People have taken their air filters out of their automobiles and run them through a radiological analysis and we can see these little specks of radioactive hot particles.
And these have been picked up all over.
I mean, this, we're talking about a hemispheric consequence.
And this is, you know, again, we could see this catastrophe reignite and then burn.
And that's just the atmospheric part.
We've also got 300 tons of radioactive water 300 to 400 tons of radioactive water, literally a river coming off of the mountains above Fukushima Daiichi, flowing underground in an aquifer that then mixes with the radioactive cores that have melted in the basements of these things.
You know, TEPCO has constructed a makeshift filtration system that's pumping some of this radioactive water up.
They're also trying to pump water up out of the ground before it gets to the site where it gets contaminated.
But we still have right now, today, more than 1,000 tanks filled with tremendous amounts
of radioactive water.
It's like the Sorcerer's Apprentice in megafold.
I have heard people on Talking Heads and even scientists on, as you point out, CNN and elsewhere, who have said, Yes, it's bad, but you know what?
The ocean is big, and there is a very good dilution effect, and there's not going to be that much to worry about.
Now, it depends.
I'm worried about what's already happened, Paul, and how much radioactivity has already gone into the ocean, and the effect of that radioactivity.
Right.
Any comments?
Yes.
That contamination Has been ongoing since March of 2011, and it has not let up.
We have a constant flow of radioactive water going into the Pacific Ocean there, and it is then mixing with current.
Yes, it dilutes, but it also... I mean, that's just half the picture.
That's the terrible part about this lie that we're being told.
Because, you know, we also know that the plankton in the ocean magnifies the cesium-137 a thousandfold.
And then the little fish come along and they eat the plankton, and then they magnify the cesium in their body, and then the bigger fish come along and they eat the The little fish.
And so it moves up the food chain to where now you've got Stanford University and Stony Brook now confirming that bluefin tuna that spawn off the coast of Fukushima are part, and they migrate over the northern Pacific to the west coast to California where they become sport fish.
And they feed in the waters off the coast, so they're migrating now.
This is their second migration from the waters off the coast of Fukushima where they've been feeding on radioactive material that's bio-magnifying up through the food chain.
Cesium-137 mimics potassium, so it goes right to the muscle tissue.
Cesium-137 has a half-life of?
30 years.
And you expect a biological hazard anywhere from 10 to 20 half-lives.
So this accident has introduced a biocide, you know, into the environment.
That has an effect that represents an effective hazard for 300 to 600 years.
And we're adding to it every day, right?
You know, there are the routine releases.
They're small, but they're cumulative.
You know, this again is... Well, they originally were pouring water and pouring water over these reactors, probably right over the open cores, I would imagine.
Yes.
And trying to keep it cool.
And every day they're still doing that.
Yeah, that's right.
And so where's all that water going?
Well, they're storing some of it.
They started storing some of it, but in the beginning, that water was just washing right
into the Pacific, was it not?
Yes.
It was.
But they still have these tanks leaking now.
We've got, yeah, I know.
Paul Gunter is my guest.
We're talking about Fukushima.
Your container is probably shaking a little right now.
My guest is Paul Gunter.
We're talking about the Fukushima situation.
And Paul, I want to drag you back to get a complete answer.
Something you didn't answer and that is if number four comes down and all those rods are exposed to the air and they catch fire, we're going to have an atmospheric situation.
So there must be some studies, somebody who has some idea of actually what will happen.
Will Tokyo be evacuated?
Will Japan be in trouble for A hundred years.
Will North America be in trouble?
I know it depends on which way the wind is blowing, but as I mentioned, it'll be a long, like long-form radio, it's going to be a long-form catastrophe, and the wind will blow in many different ways.
Who knows?
A typhoon could even come along.
How disastrous would that be?
Again, let me put it this way.
You started out this conversation mentioning Armageddon, and I've been involved in this struggle for quite some time, but I've never been more impressed by a story that appeared in the New York Times just a few months after the Chernobyl nuclear accident in Ukraine.
And I'm not, let me start by saying I'm not a churchgoer, I'm not religious, but I do have a spiritual sense, and particularly a keen awareness of some uncanny prophecies.
But there's one that comes out of the story of Armageddon that I think is appropriate to revisit.
But again, it was in the New York Times where a Russian historian appeared in Moscow.
This was before Glasnost and Perestroika.
So he starts out by saying, you know, I want to tell you that I'm a very good communist and I'm an atheist, but this is incredible.
And he told the gathered He held up in one hand a Bible, and in the other, he produced a Ukrainian dictionary.
He says, look at this!
And he opens to the book of the Revelations of St.
John, and he reads from chapter 8, verses 10 and 11, and the third angel trumpeted, And a great star fell upon the earth, burning as it were a lamp.
And the name of the star is Wormwood.
And it fell upon a third of the waters, rivers, and fountains.
And it made the water bitter.
And many men died because the water was made bitter.
And he closes the Bible, and he opens the Ukrainian dictionary for Wormwood, and it's Chernobyl.
And the New York Times then goes on to talk about how people were sitting down to dinner, not just in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Germany, Scotland, Wales, to the contamination that was coming in the rain.
And, you know, you could go to places like Stuttgart, Germany, and the streets would be empty because the people feared the rain that came following the Chernobyl accident.
And these are the kinds of proportions that this particular technological catastrophe poses.
But there was only one unit involved in the Chernobyl accident.
We've got We've got four that are destroyed right now.
It's wreckage.
There's no containment.
They're leaning.
It could collapse and reignite, and then in a cascade of events, we could see certainly tens of millions of people most immediately affected And then, depending on the fire, the intensity, it could be lofted very high, even into the jet stream.
And then that would circulate.
Oh, yes.
And it would precipitate.
It would be fallout.
it would it would precipitate it would you know we would be it would be fallout
and uh...
and it would linger
and there's no clean up
maybe you can maybe you can give me a uh... comparison uh... between chernobyl as it ended up
it's got the big circle that goes over it uh... and
what we've got going on in fukushima should Well, you know, again, it contaminates the food chain.
and these things come tumbling down, either through natural disaster or
through a man-made disaster as they try and pick each one of these things up. I
can't even imagine that. But worst-case scenario, we've got a fire, we've got
atmospheric pollution. How bad? Well, you know, again it contaminates the food
chain. You know, people might... I can't say that we would see
prompt fatalities here in the United States.
I wouldn't expect that.
There might very well be prompt fatalities in Japan.
I was going to say, let us begin with Japan.
What would the level of catastrophe be there?
It certainly could...
People would experience things like spontaneous abortions.
These are, this is all clinical evidence, you know, from the study of the effects of radiation on the biology.
And doses could get high enough that people on site would either die or be on a suicide mission to return to that site to do any work.
That's certainly a concern.
This is our major concern.
That it would exclude all future human interaction with the disaster.
What about Tokyo?
Again, we've already seen Prime Minister Nato Kan effectively begin the evacuation of Tokyo.
that was that was part of the plan that if as the
as the disaster began to
continues to unfold uh... following the explosions
uh... which by the way contaminated the u s seven fleet
that was uh... hundred fifty miles off the coast of japan with uh... the radioactivity from those
uh... those explosions in the breaches of containment uh...
and uh... then uh...
but you know there are did you do you do you have these it without
without question the clinical evidence is is that radiation causes
cancer causes birth defects
causes genetic mutation causes uh... spontaneous abortion
it uh...
causes disease.
It causes immune deficiency.
It causes failure to thrive.
This is all evidenced in clinical studies.
But you are hard-pressed to do the forensics on a neutron particle going through your body mass to see if it is killing or damaging or disrupting Your DNA.
That kind of level, we're still working on that, but we do have cytologists who have recorded the cellular damage from the Chernobyl accident.
And this kind of damage can even skip generations without necessarily showing impacts.
But when you damage DNA, you have A deleterious effect, which means that you can't necessarily identify it, but it's negative.
It's not good for you.
You know, that's why we have housing codes that require radon measurements in your basement.
But when you're talking about hemispheric fallout, this is going to have, you know, very widespread land contamination and generational impacts.
What could they do?
I mean, if number four went, they became exposed, they started to burn, what kind of response would even be possible?
Well, you know, what we saw at Chernobyl were the mobilization of the military to drop lead And concrete and graphite, you know, onto these, onto the Chernobyl Unit 4 into the open, you know, the building that was gone, you know, into that fire.
And a lot of the pilots, you know, these are where some of the prompt fatalities did occur from Chernobyl.
Those firefighters, those helicopter pilots, That basically looked to close the door on hell.
This would be one of the scenarios that we would see probably come into play again if Unit 4 topples.
But again, you know, even then, even with those operations, we've still got food restrictions
more than 2000 miles away on lamb in Scotland and Wales.
And you know, they graze upon the spring grass that brings up cesium-137, you know, this
300 to 600 year biological hazard, comes up every year, comes into the ewes' milk, the
lamb concentrates the cesium-137, and the meat is unset for human consumption because
it's too radioactive.
But you're talking about...
Tea from Turkey?
You know, we just had an event recorded last week.
Blueberry preserves that you can get on the market here in the United States that were from Bulgaria.
Contaminated with cesium-137 from the Chernobyl accident in 1986 that got picked up in a radiological survey in Japan.
So, we still have, you know, the lingering biological hazard that, according to the National Institute of Health, A recent study that they've put out is that cancer incidents, particularly thyroid cancer, it's still going up, it's not declining from the Chernobyl accident.
So these are all early indicators.
But again, the nuclear industry would like you to believe that only 35 firefighters died.
That's their study.
And so we do have this war of credibility going on right now, where studies are used to obfuscate, or as the industry would say, Those other studies are used by fear mongers.
I don't want to be that, but I do recognize the terrible situation in Fukushima, and if number four goes, I mean, after all, the building is leaning, it's sinking, there's every possibility that what I'm talking about could happen.
If it did, Paul, if it did, perhaps you could give us an idea of scale?
Would it be worse than Chernobyl?
It could very well dwarf Chernobyl.
Dwarf it?
Dwarf it, because it would involve multiple meltdowns.
And more particularly, you know, again, the scenario that we see and are concerned with is Radioactive contamination that first precludes human intervention at Fukushima Daiichi.
And then, you know, 30 miles down closer to Tokyo, you've got Fukushima Daini.
And if the concentrations of fallout then spread down the coast to Fukushima Daini, then you have Exclusion zones, where human activity is restricted, and if the ground shine is high enough, if you're getting enough gamma radiation out of it, that it would preclude human entry.
you know, this is the domino theory that prompted Donald, or not Donald,
Now to Khan, to begin thinking about evacuating 35 million people from Tokyo, but you know,
this would be a catastrophe that would remind me of on the beach.
Oh, on the beach, yes I recall, nuclear war, vividly on the beach.
I mean, Fukushima's on the beach.
It certainly is.
And Fukushima could be everywhere.
It's right on the beach.
And yes, indeed, it could be everywhere.
In fact, when this occurred, when that earthquake occurred, I was in the Philippines, living in the Philippines.
And we thought, oh, God, the fish are going to be not edible.
And it's going to get to us first.
But in fact, If you look at what happens from Japan, the air movement and the ocean movement move things toward North America, correct?
Yes.
This is so horrible that it's actually hard to talk about.
I try to be an optimist about this.
I'm concerned, though, because of the institutionalized lying that comes out of this industry.
Let's talk about that a little bit, Paul, because if you look back at Chernobyl, you look at Three Mile Island, you look at any nuclear accident that has occurred, it is always surrounded by almost like a dome of lies that go around any nuclear incident.
Why is that?
What we've seen, and I've been through a few of these from the catbird seat, that when they lose control of the reaction in the, in these nuclear power plants, they seek to control the information.
So when they, when they, when the radiation, their primary concern is, after they've lost containment of radiation, is to not let the truth out.
To not let information out.
We, we see information Lag.
Three Mile Island, March 28th, 1979.
The plant experiences loss of coolant, core damage, but it's not until days later that Governor Thornburg advises pregnant women and children Maybe you ought to get out of the area for five miles around this plant.
It prompted spontaneous evacuations of hospitals, staff, doctors, x-ray technicians, you know, 25 miles away.
They spontaneously evacuated on an advisory for children and pregnant women to leave.
But that didn't come until days later.
Following the Chernobyl accident, It wasn't the Soviet Union that notified the world, it was a Swedish nuclear power plant that picked up a radioactive cloud that registered on its radiological monitoring equipment.
But it didn't, it didn't, they knew and they were sophisticated enough to know that it wasn't their radioactive signature.
And so they traced it back And finally, the truth came out.
But, you know, Moscow let the May Day parades proceed in the open streets of Kiev to hold back the truth of the explosion and meltdown that was, and is today, poisoning the Dnieper River that runs right through Kiev.
And the same is true for Fukushima Daiichi.
You know, the information, we can't tell if they're simply inept or if it's deliberate obfuscation.
But it is a pattern that eventually The truth will out.
It's institutionalized lying by the nuclear industry that first told you that it was a peaceful atom as the fallout fell on St.
George, Utah from nuclear weapons testing.
You know, we knew, there are documents, we've got documents now from 1952 You know, the Peaceful Atom got floated out in 1954 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, but in 1952, the Atomic Energy Commission, in papers with Dow, Monsanto, Detroit Edison, Union Carbide, floated a proposal for dual-purpose reactors where they said that it was time for
Corporate business America to merge with the national security interests to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons and use the heat to co-generate electricity.
That's what the Atomic Energy Commission and these joint white papers concluded, that it could happen.
But there were a lot of problems.
Nobody could get insured to do this kind of work.
So they had to concoct the Price-Anderson Act to make the taxpayer liable for if that impossible accident were to happen.
but it certainly wasn't so impossible that not one reactor would have been constructed
had not they received assurance that they would not be liable for the catastrophe.
Fukushima right now, it's hard to say, but it's somewhere between 250 and 500 billion dollars in costs after two years.
Chernobyl, again, Chernobyl's on the proportions of about 600 billion after 26 years.
And so, you know, but the the Fukushima accident is still accelerating, and certainly don't think that Chernobyl couldn't rear its head again.
It could, yes.
If these structures collapse, It will loft the radioactivity back into the atmosphere.
Paul, a quick question for you, Paul.
Are you comfortable that TEPCO is going to be able to handle from now until Fukushima is no longer a problem?
No.
We don't believe that Japan is capable.
This should be an international effort.
All right, hold it right there.
We'll come right back.
We've got to take breaks every now and then.
My guest is scaring me.
Paul Gunter is his name, and we're talking about Fukushima.
What a mess.
Okay, back now to our guest, and you're back on the air, Paul.
It's almost hard to know where to go.
What I do want to do is open our phone lines are beginning now and uh... lineup calls because i know there are a lot of people with questions about fukushima and uh... i'm one of them i want to drag you back now to the fish and the sea life and the environment uh... assuming that it doesn't get any worse and that they keep uh... that water seawater keeps uh... getting contaminated and going into the sea
I wonder if anybody's making any estimations, Paul, about the environmental impact eventually.
Right.
Again, the accident is just over two and a half years old, and it's still occurring.
We have no containment for multiple reactor meltdowns.
We have You know, essentially, Tokyo Electric Power Company is the Mickey Mouse in The Sorcerer's Apprentice in Fantasia.
If you've got that picture, they're sloshing around in all this radioactive water right now, completely out of control.
You know, underground water movement.
They're talking about freezing A wall in the ground down to 90 feet underground.
Can that work?
Can it work?
It's a tremendous amount of electricity, energy.
These are unprecedented for this kind of use.
They're also talking about, you know, chemically trying to seal The, you know, a wall between the Fukushima wreckage and the ocean.
But you have to understand that that frozen wall and that chemical wall then become a dam.
And then the water begins to build up behind the dam, which happens to be the Fukushima site.
And the ground becomes more and more saturated, and then another earthquake comes along.
And these reactor accidents are, you know, basically floating in their own waste.
Okay, let's try this, Paul.
Any of these solutions suggested, the freezing, the frozen wall, or anything else they're suggesting right now, Can these things work or not?
These are all desperate moves.
The focus right now has to be on the most vulnerable.
There are too many priorities here, but one clearly is this elevated storage pond with hundreds of tons of high-level radioactive waste That could tip over.
We've got to get that, we've got to get those fuel assemblies out and they've got to be put into a secure cooling pond at surface so that we can get them down to temperature where they can then be loaded into what are called dry cask.
My understanding is this process already has begun.
I think around November 8th they said it was going to begin.
Are you aware of whether it actually has started?
It's scheduled to begin in November.
We know that there are some dry casks that survived the earthquake and the tsunami.
These are clearly temporary in themselves.
You can put nuclear waste that's cooled After three, four years, five years, you can put it into what looks like a thermos, and then you get the air out of the thermos, and you inert it with helium.
Helium's a very effective heat transfer, so the hot nuclear waste then can transmit its heat through the helium to the thermos wall, and then that sits inside of a concrete cask.
That naturally ventilates.
And so that's passive cooling.
And you can seal these things.
Unfortunately, we're seeing seals on these casks start to degrade after 10 years.
All right.
Well, in a sense, it's already begun.
Tepco's got a 273 ton mobile crane right now above the building, right?
They've rebuilt it.
They've rebuilt it.
So that's the original one that was there?
It's not the original.
It replaces the one that was wrecked in the explosion.
And they're going to have to remove fuel rods one at a time, very carefully.
How do they keep them from catching fire as they're moving them?
They will put them into what they call hot cells.
They will spray them with water, and they will keep a cooling operation going as long as they have power.
One of the main concerns is going to be, again, this is like pick-up sticks.
You touch one, and then the other ones that lean or support it, they move too.
And some of these assemblies are probably damaged.
Uh, and then they fall apart, and then you have all the uranium then fall to the bottom of the pool.
And, you know, how much, what percentage of that is, um, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna find out, because we've gotta get it out of that elevated configuration, which could fall over.
That's priority one.
And then it's gotta get, then we've gotta discover where those melted cores are.
And then we've got to deal with getting this fuel into more secure, albeit temporary, dry cask storage.
So it begins to passively cool in these dry casks.
Okay, here's a question for you, Paul.
If you're able to answer it, it is this.
We don't know where the fuel is right now.
We do know what we're facing in trying to get these rods moved, but if you get a whole bunch of this stuff together, I understand you're not going to have an atomic explosion of any kind, but could fission begin?
You can get a supercriticality that causes an accident that we already saw in Japan at Tokamura, where the workers around the criticality were killed. They had a very small amount of
radioactive. We're talking about much orders of magnitude more radioactive material. And
already we have lost containment.
The containments are damaged on the reactor cores. And then you've got these fuel pools
that sit six to ten stories up in the attic of these damaged reactor buildings that are
outside of containment that have to be kept underwater.
and And if they don't, they catch fire.
When they catch fire, zirconium burns like a flare.
Okay, I want to ask one other question.
I'm going to shift geographic locations for a moment.
Do you know where I'm located, Paul?
You're in Nevada.
Yes, I'm in Nevada.
I'm in a little town called Pahrump, Nevada.
Have you ever heard of that?
Yes.
I'm going to be one of the closest people to Yucca Mountain.
If you were in my little town, And they began putting high-level radioactivity into Yucca Mountain.
Would you be comfortable?
No.
I would be most concerned.
I'm sure that you live close enough to Yucca Mountain that you've already felt some of the earthquakes.
We've had a few shakers, not many.
I do recall one 7.3 some years ago.
But yes, there are small earthquakes.
So you're saying we're not a geologically stable place?
You're crisscrossed.
The Yucca Mountain site, where they're talking about anywhere from 70,000 to 120,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste, and even then that is not necessarily capped.
But there are Technical considerations because this stuff's going to be super hot.
It's going to heat up the rock body itself.
It could set up convection currents that draws water to the repository.
It also, but you know, the main thing are, you know, like the ghost dance fault there that runs right through where they would put all this nuclear waste is Evidenced, as many of these other earthquake faults are evidenced, to have volcanic ash in the fault line.
And so volcanic ash has already come through there over the geology of the site.
Yucca Mountain is surrounded by young volcanoes.
We know this.
The Lathrop-Well cinder cones.
They're so young that erosion hasn't really had that big an effect on them.
So, you're talking about putting hundreds of tons of timeless biological hazard into a seismologically and volcanically active area 90 miles from Las Vegas.
You couldn't write a better science fiction story than that.
Who's behind that kind of devious planning?
Not friends of Nevada.
Listen, how long would we have to keep that stuff safe?
You know, the repository, according to the EPA, we're talking, you know, more than a million years.
A million.
More than a million years.
Certainly, we're talking about epochs.
A million years?
What have we ever done for a million years?
Well, you won't be getting any electricity from it.
This is the thing about nuclear power.
You have to understand this.
Electricity is but the fleeting byproduct.
The enduring product of nuclear power is nuclear waste, which also happens to be the fundamental building block for nuclear weapons.
And it really endures.
It's there a long time.
Millions of years.
Millions of years.
Okay, a couple of quick questions from the audience.
Bernardo up in Canada, hello.
Hi Art.
Hi Paul.
Hello.
Hello.
I have a question regarding Japanese culture.
I mean, everyone's told not to stir up any problems or say anything wrong about what's going on with Fukushima, but when will the Japanese government really realize that this could be worse?
I mean, it probably is worse than Chernobyl.
You know, I was just in Japan in December of 2012, and I understand your question on the culture of authority, of recognizing and obeying authority.
I mean, we have it to a degree here in the United States, and it's instilled.
in society to obey.
But the Japanese have a high regard for authority and discipline.
But, you know, we're seeing demonstrations now, 40, 50,000 people, 60,000 people out in the streets.
Even the Japanese have their limits.
Absolutely.
And they're recognizing now that the The spread of this nuclear threat, as well as the fact that there is no real cleaning up of Fukushima because they're going to bring it to somebody else's place.
So what the Japanese have recognized is that Cleanup is really a misnomer for transcontamination of Fukushima.
You know, they've got tens of thousands of blue tarped piles of dirt that have been bulldozed to concentrate, you know, to pull the seizing 137, scrape it off the ground.
And you know, somebody's plan is to take that somewhere else.
But nobody wants it.
Where?
Nobody, you know, they can't find a place for it, because people understand, just like Nevada understands, that cleanup and disposal means that you get trans-contaminated.
You get the contamination, and you get it forever.
And that's, you know, that is the other big lie about nuclear power.
Is that we constantly hear this, that, oh, you know, we can put all the nuclear waste in the country in a football field.
And believe me, nobody would be able to play football there anymore.
I think not.
Right.
Nor into the, you know, nor into the far, far future.
But it's not volume that we're concerned about.
It's about concentrating that mass and that radioactivity, and to keep it away from water, for example.
And you've got, so you've got the Colorado River, you know, is part of the aquifer system
there.
Yes, in fact, here in Trump, we drink our water from a well.
We've got a pretty good size aquifer underneath our feet here.
And it's a natural worry, Paul, that anything put in Yucca Mountain, while they say it can't reach the aquifer, they say all kinds of things, Paul.
We have... the studies show that You know, they've got a borehole into Yucca Mountain already.
It's, you know, I don't, I think it's about 90 billion dollars.
You know, it's some incredible figure of, you know, that has, they've got a hole there.
And in that hole, deep down in that table mesa, they have evidenced Rainwater from the surface at the repository depth and the reason they know it's rainwater is because it has radioactive chlorine that came in the rain from the Pacific weapons tests.
And it's so rainwater is already in evidence at the repository depth for Yucca Mountain.
I mean that is and you know, let me just say that If this were a process of scientific integrity, you would not start out with one side.
That is a political mugging that is occurring.
And, you know, luckily right now, Yucca Mountain's been defunded.
But, you know, we have the court systems saying that the NRC still has to proceed with the licensing process, even though there is no money.
Now let me tell you something, Paul.
we already see coming right through from nevada our little town
carrying uh... what they're calling relatively low-level stuff
the yucca mountain who were you aware of that no i wasn't aware that i mean
how far are you from beady nevada you know i would all all bet your dollars to donuts going
to beady to beady
okay yes all right now to south carolina right now and not
around the earth they got a lot of mega rosswell theater organ on my own
repeat banks all
all i got a lot of a couple points to my own the first one of the world
i don't know if this is not the script discussion matter not about i don't
believe that we we have information technology from extra-terrestrials politically
did it seems like they would have to put the excuse me to review
it when you wait all the way off topic here
Oh, I know, that's what I'm saying.
I know it's not what we're talking about tonight, but I just don't believe that we have technology from extraterrestrials, because it seems like... I don't either.
Thank you very much for the call, and take care.
California brings Roxanne.
Hello, Roxanne.
I have a question.
I live in Southern California and I'm right on the ocean and I want to know how long it's going to be safe to eat fish for and also when are we going to see the ocean water contaminated high enough that we shouldn't be swimming in it and what's going to happen to the whole west coast of the US?
Alright, there's a lot of questions there.
The fish, that really is an important question.
I'm married to a Filipina.
She eats a lot of fish.
If number four should go and we get a worst case scenario, Paul, at what point would we be worried about eating fish?
Well, you know, there are food bans on fish now off the coast of Fukushima.
You know, the Fukushima accident has put a fishing industry on the coast of Japan out of business.
And that, unfortunately, is indefinite.
We've seen food restrictions on fish, as well as a whole host of agricultural products from several of the prefectures there in Japan.
and everything from mushrooms to milk.
And actually the US Food and Drug Administration put out an alert just a couple of weeks ago
that basically instituted those same bans on Japanese products here in the United States.
So we now see the US FDA now taking the food restrictions in Japan and applying them to
those products, you know, they're not allowed in the United States.
Now, the concern about, you know, the... Alright, let me ask it this way.
There are fish caught off the coast of Alaska.
You're a mind reader.
Yeah, if we get the very worst case scenario, or even just a really bad one, which we already have, How long before I have to worry about eating salmon?
Those are good questions, and I think the way, you know, I can't tell you definitively.
The problem, Art, is that we, the government of the United States, is not doing any radiological monitoring of the fish.
Wonderful!
Oh, that's just wonderful!
We're doing no monitoring?
You know, there is no orchestrated monitoring focused on the Fukushima accident in the United States.
We even saw in the wake of the accident, within months, that the US EPA began to back down its monitoring of things like rainwater.
We saw monitors You know, taken offline for service.
I saw a headline.
I saw a headline, Paul, the other day that said that the radiological measurements being made in Hawaii actually sort of went off the chart the other day.
They suddenly got a lot of radiation in Hawaii.
Had you heard that?
I didn't see that one.
But we have seen spikes Particularly early on, we saw the spikes of iodine-131, which is one of the more mobile.
Although tritium is radioactive hydrogen, these are highly mobile radioactive products that is sort of radioactivity on roller skates.
It just jets out there.
And then there are more, they're heavier particulate behind that.
But, you know, without question, the marine environment is now taking the diluted radioactivity that's coming off both atmospherically and then fall out into the ocean and also direct discharge into the ocean.
It is then bio-magnifying up through the food chain.
And then bioconcentrating in marine biota and ultimately it threatens those at the top of the food chain.
All right.
I want to go to Skype and say, Adam, you're on the air with Paul Gunter.
Hi, Paul.
Good evening and Peter Roswell's there, Art.
Thank you.
With the FDA having a lot of trouble even, you know, just checking our food supply for normal routine hazards, I do have a concern about, you know, this radiation getting into our food chain here.
If one wanted to get like an inexpensive but reliable radiation device to measure, like when you go to the grocery store, what would something like that run and Do you have any recommended sources for that?
Let me say that there is a concern for consumption of radioactivity that you can't measure with a Geiger counter.
Particularly if you're taking in If you're regularly consuming, you wouldn't necessarily pick up that radioactivity with a Geiger counter.
If you do, it's pretty hot stuff already.
But concern goes to the level of where you would take a fish, reduce it to ash, and then measure the radioactivity in that ash as a more accurate measure of what What's represented in the biological hazard.
So the answer is no.
There's nothing that you can buy right now.
Certainly if it gets hot enough that you're picking up, you know, I can say that there are fish off the coast of Japan that they monitor with a Geiger counter and they're getting readings.
So, you know, I don't necessarily see that right now in For California, and we've got no evidence of that.
Frankly, we've not even seen any evidence of tsunami debris coming up on the West Coast that would actually register on a Geiger counter.
So I don't know, there may be some out there, but I've not seen that reported at this point.
But we are vigilant for this kind of stuff.
And part of that vigilance, we think, should be from the U.S.
government, and we don't see that level of responsibility right now.
Okay.
Washington brings Brian.
Hi, Brian.
Hey, Edgar Oswald and Paul.
Hello.
Good topic tonight.
I live in Washington State, about five to ten miles away from the Hanford nuclear power plant, and lately we've been having Quite a bit of tornadoes up in the area, about 60 miles away from the plant.
I do know that they're also doing a lot of hazardous material cleanup with the dirt and stuff like that.
And I was just wondering if there was any threat from the tornadoes up in the Washington area, as well as any threat for the hazardous material dirt that they're cleaning up.
Okay, off the air.
Okay, tornadoes in Washington, eh?
Well, we've seen some supercell tornadoes now.
I mean, one of the aspects of climate change is the increase in severity and frequency.
Certainly, tornadoes are on everybody's concern list right now.
The thing about Hanford is that that's an old nuclear production facility.
You've got these corroding tanks of nuclear waste that have to be constantly maintained because if they're not, they could explode.
If there are disruptions of power that result in long outages, you know, this represents a concern.
You know, it's also a seismologically active site that runs through that area, so there is lots of natural events that raise the concern, but you also have to realize that we have a Fukushima-style reactor, Columbia Nuclear Power Station, it's one of these GE Mark II reactors, sitting right next to these High-level nuclear waste tanks from the 1940s and 1950s.
So you've got a double threat sitting up there in Hanford.
And, you know, it's a big concern because it's also right on the Columbia River.
I mean, you could have, you know, another natural event threat there is dam breaks.
Alright, well, hold tight, hold tight, we're going to do a break here.
We'll come back and explore more of all of this, all things nuclear, actually, not just Fukushima, though it is the main focus of the night, I might add, of the year, maybe the century.
From the high desert in the great American southwest, this is Dark Matter.
Sometimes music punctuates topics so well.
This one does, with this one.
Paul Gunter is my guest, and we're talking about Fukushima and so much more.
But I guess mainly, right now, Fukushima.
God, it's scary stuff.
Really scary stuff.
To imagine what they've got to do in Japan right now, to get control of this in any way at all, any real way at all, and prevent something much larger from occurring.
I don't know.
And confidence in JEPCO?
Not really high.
Now, I'm speaking personally.
Not really high.
Let's go quickly to Skype.
Michael, you're on with Paul Gunder.
Good evening.
Paul, a question that you said, if number four reactor would fall, you would have the option of going in there and Uh, making a concrete mix with graphite and some other, uh, uh, ingredients.
Why not just go in there and completely fill, uh, put a mat slab on top of the entire, uh, uh, bunch of reactors there?
Okay.
You said it would, that the concrete would start breaking down in 10 years, but that would, wouldn't it give us 10 years to formulate a better plan?
Okay.
Paul?
Well, you know, what occurred at Chernobyl was they mobilized a helicopter army to carry in graphite and lead and sand and they buried the burning reactor.
The difference here at Chernobyl is that you have hundreds of tons of nuclear waste sitting Up on top of the reactor building, and if you bomb that like they did at Chernobyl, you would, in fact, cause the collapse you were looking to prevent.
And the catastrophe would then... I mean, that's why they haven't done that now.
They considered that, but the Japanese authorities, even with international consultation, they're looking to Go at that piecemeal right now.
All right, let me try putting you on the spot here, Paul.
I understand how you're coming at this whole subject, but if I were to put you in charge, the guy who is going to tell everybody how to handle this and what to do, what would your marching orders be?
We would assemble an international team of independent experts.
First of all, you know, pull the best minds together because of the international, the global consequence of making the wrong move.
This would have to be very carefully deliberated and you have to remove it completely from the financial interests of this teetering utility.
I mean, they're looking to cover their financial assets, and that has to be not the priority any longer.
It has to be public health and safety and the environment have to take precedent.
And because of the far reach, both in terms of distance And into the future.
We've got to get our priorities straight, and that means an assembly of the best minds that are independent of a public relations campaign for the nuclear industry.
Okay, let's go to Josh in Utah.
Josh, you're on the air with Paul.
Hi there.
Paul, I have a question for you.
I hear you compare this incident a lot to Chernobyl, but I wonder, what would happen if, worst case scenario, everything went south, maybe it got bombed, how would that compare to what happened when the bomb was dropped in Hiroshima?
Oh, these are, you know, 15,000 times the radiation or more than Hiroshima.
Hiroshima would be a firecracker to this, in terms of radiological impact.
Boy, that's frightening.
That's really frightening.
And as you pointed out, it would depend on which way the wind was blowing.
I want to remind everybody, we've got Skype.
If you want to reach me on Skype, I am Art.Bell51.
Simple as that.
You're on the air, and I can't tell Texas.
Mike!
Hey, Art, how you doing?
Okay, sir.
Is this guy Paul?
Are you a nuclear physicist?
I'm an environmental activist.
Okay, you're a what?
I am an activist.
I come at this from 35 years of dealing with the nuclear industry when they wanted to build two large reactors on a sensitive salt marsh estuary I basically said, along with a growing community, that we have a role in making decisions for our future, and for our children's children's children's future.
Prior to joining Beyond Nuclear, he served 16 years as the director of the Reactor Watchdog Project for Nuclear Information and Resource Service, an environmental activist, indeed.
So, there you go.
What's your question?
Okay, the question is, I got two different things that we could probably do.
One of them would be, why can't we nuke it?
Okay, I'm sorry, I just shouldn't have laughed.
Paul, why can't we nuke it?
Well, I mean, we're trying to contain it.
That is, you know, we've lost containment.
To vaporize, uh, you know, thousands of tons of nuclear waste, uh, you know, is a little like, uh, killing the patient to save it.
No, not really, because it's going to go on for a long, long, long time.
This is a disaster.
We've had 500 open-air atomic explosions.
Oh, thousands.
We've had thousands.
Thousands.
and then certainly that will be there and i don't think i remove that
the logs on a couple reactors
what they will remove the rod will be better just to have one small flash
and i didn't consider it before court he said the quarter of the ground right
we don't know where they are small plans that were the most most nuclear explosions are not
generally described as small okay well one
to kill a bomb blast in the federal burnout well what is all that we're told that radioactive uh...
debris in the atmosphere go
Go.
Same thing as it did in Nevada.
If it's that bad, what kind of options?
You only have two options.
That's one.
What would be worse?
Let me just say... I want to hear his other option.
Hold on, Paul.
I really want to hear this.
Go ahead, sir.
I'm missing something.
we would like to have a quick look at the two before that would be to get a
real proof of i'm not a real physicist
but if i can't do that six thousand eighty seven thousand feet deep
then you've got it just bomb a canal right over the top of it and that ocean
water and seven thousand feet
it that they should just uh... stop there i'm missing something
rolled up on the again You wait till the cores get like 5,000 to 7,000 feet deep.
Oh, into the ground?
He's thinking they're headed for, well, it wouldn't be China Syndrome, it's in Japan, so it's probably headed for, I don't know, South America or something.
So, yeah, well, no, 7,000 feet's not that deep.
And then you just go neutron bomb a large hooker buster and just dig a canal right over the top of it.
Okay, I've got it now.
This guy likes bombs.
Yeah, well, we're sitting on one.
He really likes bombs.
And I probably shouldn't have laughed off his nuclear explosion idea, but another thing to think about is Japan is a very highly populated place.
Any nuclear bomb going off is going to have, particularly scattering all this radioactivity.
I mean, that's a big concern, Art, today that Any of these, you know, nuclear power plants, we've got them all around Washington DC.
These are pre-deployed radiological weapons of mass destruction.
If you have an insider, if you've got a dedicated team that's willing to die for their cause.
Let me remind the listeners that the 9-11 Commission that looked at the Al-Qaeda plan for the United States originally was to hijack 10 aircraft and to direct two of those aircraft into nuclear power plants.
Mohammed Atta, when he was doing his flight training to take over a U.S.
commercial airliner to deliver a strike on the world towers there.
His flight pattern took him over to survey the Indian Point nuclear power plant, which
which is 25 miles from New York.
And so, delivering an aircraft into a nuclear power plant, we've got a National Academy of Sciences study that looks at what Would be the concern if you flew an aircraft into one of these General Electric Mark 1 boiling water reactors that's got all the nuclear waste up on the roof in the attic.
You know, in the United States, you know, we're certainly concerned about Fukushima there with 400 tons.
Right.
Paul, let me stop you and ask you directly, what would happen if an aircraft of that size hit that reactor?
What would happen?
The National Academies of Science says that there would be cancer deaths 500 miles away.
In other words, it would be breached, and it would be horrible.
Yes.
There's no superstructure over these spent fuel pools, as they call them.
They're anything but spent, but there's no superstructure Over that would prevent aircraft penetration and a nuclear fire.
And in our case, the United States, we've got a lot of these pools are on the order of 750 metric tons.
You know, the one that's there 60 miles south of New York City at Tom's River, New Jersey, the first General Electric Mark 1 boiling water reactor was was built here in the United States.
It was the prototype for Fukushima Daiichi and it has on the order of 700 metric tons of high-level nuclear waste sitting up in a pool in the attic that it makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck now to say that it wouldn't take a commercial aircraft it could be shaped charges delivered in a
Twin-engine Cessna that takes off from an airfield 10 miles away.
These things are, you might as well put bullseyes on the side, but we don't seem to be able to raise the level of concern to the U.S.
government to address the vulnerability that exists today.
Okay, let's jump, we're on the phones here, so Joy in California, your turn.
Hi, hi Paul.
I just wanted to mention also there would be a huge evacuation problem at Indian Point, but my question about Fukushima is that I was reading the other day that the mob, the Japanese mob is involved with these contractors and the subcontractors and it's kind of infiltrated into TEPCO.
What kind of security risk does that put Everybody at, including TEPCO, because they could smuggle all kinds of weird stuff out of that plant.
It is, again, it's a prime reason for an international, independent effort that's needed now to intervene with the priority being public health and safety in the environment.
And that's a big, you know, we've seen that level of infiltration by organized crime, introduce things at the Fukushima site so that workers are going in there with their disseminators in lead cases so that they are, you know, literally shielding their radiological monitors from radiation exposure rather than their bodies so they can, you know, get more time out of the workers doing these dangerous exposures.
So, you know, it's that kind of institutionalized lying that permeates this catastrophe from the very beginning, and now threatens the responsible recovery.
How will we know if something terrible happens when they do this cleanup?
Like if the rods cross or it sets on fire.
I heard now they're going to be having a media blackout.
Oh?
There's been a problem... What, what, what, what?
Media blackout?
Is that true, Paul?
There's been a problem with a lag of information.
There's been problems with misinformation.
I mean, we've been told that the site is secure, that the Pacific Ocean is not a concern, and then months later, TEPCO admits that it's completely out of control, that they have no control over the radiological contamination that's going into the Pacific Ocean on a daily basis.
Right, but Paul, the question is, is there going to be a media blackout?
I'd say that we're already... we have a problem with how stories are being filtered.
I mean, you know, blackout or... Right.
Hold tight, Paul.
We're at a break point.
Paul Gunter is my guest and we're discussing Fukushima and things nuclear.
What a joy.
And by the way, thank you, joy.
I'm Art Bell.
Did you know the international use of SOS has been discontinued?
No more SOS's are to be sent.
Were you aware of that?
Seems to me that we've got a fine use for it right now.
My guest is Paul Gunter.
We're talking about Fukushima and things nuclear.
If you have a question, love to have you join us either at 855-REAL-UFO, that's 855-732-5836,
or on Skype.
And you can reach me on Skype.
You don't have to be a friend of mine or a contact or whatever.
Just cause your Skype program to call Art, that's me, A-R-T dot Bell, B-E-L-L, 51.
And that will do the trick.
We'll talk to you.
In the meantime, let's go to Nebraska and Brian.
You're on the air with Paul Gunter.
Hi, Paul.
We have two nuclear plants right along the Missouri River here.
One's called Fort Calhoun.
It's been shut down for a while, but they're about to restart it.
It has a large amount of nuclear waste rods.
It's the only repository in the area, so it gets all of the nuclear waste from itself as well.
Cooper Nuclear Plant is just like Fukushima.
It's right on the bank of the Missouri River.
Both of those are susceptible to the dams breaking upstream, which could inundate both
plants with a wall of water 50 feet high.
We're aware of that.
Yep.
So, I mean, it's really scary, but 4Kelium, it was built over geological formations called
karst formations, basically big voids, or if you can think of them as caves underground,
directly below the reactor core.
And they found out recently that when the reactor was built, it wasn't built to spec
All of the concrete floors weren't the adequate strength, yet they're still allowing it to reopen.
It's a real travesty.
Something has to be done to bring the NRC to the job that they're supposed to do to protect the public.
It's not being done right now.
All right, let's review this.
Now, I wasn't aware of it.
You may have been, Paul, but I certainly wasn't.
You're saying there are dams upstream that if those dams, if one of those dams let go, they could face a wall of 50 feet of water.
Is that correct?
An inland tsunami.
And if that was associated with, you know, an earthquake that caused not only power disruption, But the dam to break?
You've got the same scenario.
You know, loss of off-site power and a huge wall of water that takes out the emergency power.
It's just, you know, so, you know, the industry likes to paint, the U.S.
industry likes to paint that disaster over there as completely remote and so extreme that you don't need to worry about it here.
It won't happen.
But we've got the identical technology.
I mean, we were, I was monitoring the Cooper nuclear power plant during a major flood in
the 1990s.
I'm trying to recall if it was 93, but there was a major flood.
That plant looked like a boat dock out in the, with floodwaters.
There were dikes breaking all around it.
And there was water coming in through the floor drains into the nuclear reactor.
And the water, even according to the NRC's own records, which didn't come out for a couple
of years after the floodwaters receded, but the water levels were encroaching upon electrical
circuits in The Cooper Nuclear Power Plant.
We had, I think it's around a couple, two years ago, the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant was inundated by a flood and they surrounded the plant with a rubber berm that then failed when a backhoe tore it open.
And the floodwaters went right to the walls of that plant.
I can tell you today that Fort Calhoun, and your caller is correct that the U.S.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Omaha Public Power District are under the gun to get this plant back Online, but they know that a lot of the electrical circuitry in that was installed below grade at that plant was never qualified to be submerged.
And, you know, these are the kinds of shortcuts, you know, subordinating financial concerns or for, you know, basically prioritizing Financial concerns and subordinating public health concerns to get these plants back online.
If I could just add one more thing.
They have a pool.
They've had to expand their waste pool two times in order to add more and more of the rods into that.
So it's dangerous not only in the fact that it's going to come back online, but every day it's a ticking time bomb as long as that waste pool has to be continually And they had a fire in their main electrical system that qualified as the second worst nuclear disaster accident in the last 10 years.
And it's an old plant.
They have a lot of deficiencies.
They have Teflon wires that are known to break down if they're exposed to any level of radiation.
That would have shut down all the control mechanisms in that plant.
And now they've also recognized that there's gaps in the tubing that connects where all the electrical conduit and control systems run through, that if there was a, there'd be no containment, and that a, you know, leak or a steam would go from one area to another.
So it's a domino, it's a domino effect that's just waiting to happen.
It would contaminate the water all throughout the southern part of the United States through Tennessee, Missouri, uh... down to louisiana nobody would have fresh water in
that whole reserve that river provides water for about twenty percent of the u.s.
and it would be a wasteland
let me just point out though that fort calhoun
uh... isn't uh...
expanding the spent fuel pool
as it is more that they're they're
didn't sleep packing more nuclear waste into that pool
So you're correct that they're expanding the nuclear waste volume and the radioactivity in that pool, but it means that they're packing it tighter and tighter and tighter.
All right, let's go to Bill in Ohio.
Hi Bill.
Yeah, hey Paul.
Hey, there was a study out recently, and it was about global climate change, but it was talking about how the climate change is seriously imperiling phytoplankton in the world's oceans, or how, you know, it will eventually imperil phytoplankton.
Will the contaminated runoff from Fukushima, will it further imperil phytoplankton?
We've seen studies that show that plankton, being the single cell and fundamental building block of the marine biology, they concentrate radioactive isotopes like cesium-137, The study I saw was 1,000 times, the phytoplankton itself can become 1,000 times more radioactive per gram than per gram of water that surrounds it.
So this is just an illustration of how you begin to reverse the dilution of pollution, which then begins this Concentration, then back up through the food chain.
Okay.
Alabama, Rob?
Yes, hi.
Good evening, guys.
Nice to talk to you, Art.
It took me quite a while to call you back here, to stop shaking when I heard you were back on the air.
Thank you.
Grew up in Nevada there, was born and raised there, third generation.
There's a lot of strange things that go on in Nevada, and I think we know that.
My question is, and I'm looking at these things that are happening overseas, and I'm wondering how long they've been actually truly trucking this stuff into the state.
I can remember growing up there and going deer hunting and antelope hunting up in northern Washoe and Humboldt County and up in that area and actually seeing the signs, you know, do not sleep on the ground because of natural radioactivity.
Being in a place, being from Nevada, in a place like that, where there is so much, it's very desolate.
You get up there, up through the Black Rock Desert and all up through there.
How much of that is really natural?
What is going to happen down at Yucca Mountain?
We look at things like Pyramid Lake, where we have possibly an underground river to Africa.
We don't know the aquifer structures throughout the state of Nevada, and if something does happen in down in Yucca Mountain and underground, excuse me, earthquake or something like that, where is this radioactivity?
Where can it end up?
Well, if you look at the studies, and even if you listen to the Department of Energy
Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency, you eventually arrive where they admit that the repository is not going to hold the nuclear waste.
That eventually it will get out.
But it will get out long after the chief executive officers have had their golden parachutes.
And these are the kinds of concerns where Only this, you know, it is this short-term financial corporation, corporate agenda that is putting our future at stake.
You know, there's not one... You know, Paul, I'm starting to wonder if it makes any difference at all whether you're short-term planning or long-term planning because the Japanese, of course, were famous for long-term planning, unlike Americans.
But whatever long-term planning they did, didn't apparently include what could happen in Fukushima.
Right.
And in fact, they, as I mentioned at the opening of the show, they took shortcuts that eventually made them vulnerable to the tsunami.
And those were short-term considerations that were made for a corporate agenda rather than an environmental protection.
And we see that playing out all over.
The Japanese were famous for long-term planning supposedly.
Brad in Nebraska, you're on the air with Paul Gunter.
Yes, I was wondering, what's the research into transmutation or like an advanced Is there a way to make the decay go faster at the Fukushima plant, like alpha or beta particle decay?
Okay, it's a good question.
The French, of course, are recycling, Paul.
And we're not.
And I asked recently, another guest I had, why we are not doing this, same thing the French are.
And he said, well, we just decided on a different model in America.
And that was that.
That was the answer.
Well, the French are using essentially a modified Westinghouse pressurized water reactor.
These are light water reactors, so the technology is the same.
They have this facility called La Hague on the Normandy coast there, where they are taking the nuclear fuel from these reactors.
They put it into nitric acid and then they're separating out plutonium and U-235
in this reprocessing facility.
We've seen the radioactive signature from the La Hague facility contaminating the Arctic
Ocean.
So, this is not a foolproof process.
The recovery is a very small percentage of the waste that is left over, and the French are in fact shipping a lot of their nuclear waste off into Siberia.
And they have, again, they have mountains of plutonium, As a result of it, and you know, this is a building block for nuclear weapons.
So, the major reason that we don't reprocess here in the United States is that it is prohibitively expensive.
I mean, the French nuclear program is not a private industry.
It is run by the French government.
And again, it's part of the military-industrial complex there in France.
How dare you have this dirty, disgust-stainer on the air!
This is Chris.
I am one of JC's disciples.
Okay, Chris in Texas, you're on the air with Paul Gunter.
How dare you have the security discussion on the air?
This is Chris, I am one of JC's disciples.
I'm in charge of the Texas French Klan.
Alright, fine.
Do you have a question for my guest, Mr. Disciple?
How dare you!
How dare you decide to release all of our nuclear secrets!
What do you think there's going to be?
Off into the ether with you.
Farida brings Matthew.
Hi, Matthew.
Hey, good evening, guys.
How you doing?
Just fine.
Alright, here's the question.
We know that we can't dump stuff on Fukushima.
We know we can't nuke it.
You know, we're talking about a highly deadly game of pick-up sticks here.
Why couldn't we just build an airtight dome over the entire section there, the whole thing, and just seal it all off completely from anything?
Okay, that's a reasonable question.
Could we do that?
Well, the problem being that the Ground underneath it is saturated with water So, you know you can put a roof over it, but you don't have a floor You have and you know, but I have to point out that that's that's exactly what's going on in Chernobyl right now they following the
accident in 1986, they brought in 600,000 people, conscripts from all over the Soviet Union, to build a sarcophagus over the Chernobyl wreckage.
And now we see a sarcophagus being constructed over the sarcophagus.
So, you know, in the future, I think that we're going to see more of these Russian dolls, where, you know, a container within a container within a container, Within a container, and that's just going to keep going on.
Alright, how about this?
Since we're talking about radical solutions, how about just bulldozing the whole damn thing into the Pacific?
A lot of radioactivity.
Oh yeah?
But again, the dilution factor.
And then the biomagnification factor.
I mean, you don't... Which would be what, Paul?
If you moved all that nuclear waste into the Pacific, it would be significant, it would be consequential, and it would be long-lasting and irretrievable.
More about making it irretrievable.
We are one biosphere.
Just like you put a glass of water in a room, eventually the water molecules spread out throughout the entire room.
This is what's playing out at Chernobyl, only the spreading out is of radioactivity.
And the more concentrations you allow to escape containment, the worse the problem becomes forever.
Okay.
All right.
I think I've got it.
Hold tight.
We're going to take a break.
And I guess this might be appropriate, hmm?
You're listening to Dark Matter.
I'm Art Bell.
We are very serious.
Paul Gunder is here.
He's an activist.
An anti-nuclear activist.
And I wonder, uh, Paul, if you are familiar with the name Andrew Karam.
Uh, no, I'm sorry.
Okay, well... Andrew Karam?
Yes, uh-huh.
I'm sorry.
Well, we had him on as a guest, and he would be your polar opposite, actually.
We should debate sometime.
You know, Paul, I was just going to ask that question.
Would you be interested in a debate of that sort?
I live for the day.
You do?
Okay.
Well, the day may come very soon, then, in your life.
You may not have to wait that long.
I will, I wait with bated breath.
Bated breath.
Perhaps slightly polluted, but bated.
Alright, Tom in Virginia, you are on the air.
Good to talk to you again, thank you.
You're very welcome.
Hey, how much does a Geiger counter radiation detector cost?
I think we should all have one for when we open up a can of tuna, eh?
Well, certainly, I mean, we kind of covered this earlier, I don't know if you heard it, but a radiation detector of that sort really wouldn't be useful to hold over your can of tuna, but there should be monitoring going on, is what I think that my guest would say.
Environmental monitoring, right Paul?
Absolutely, and you know, you can buy a Geiger counter starting at around $250, That could register radioactivity in rainwater.
I think that, you know, we see activists all over the country that are taking, you know, these relatively affordable Geiger counters and we've seen spikes in rainwater.
For example, radiation spikes in rainwater in Oregon and Washington.
That are being measured with Geiger counters.
Here's a question for you, Paul.
I've got a Geiger counter, by the way.
Here's a question.
If the worst happens at Fukushima, and we get these burning rods in the air, and we know where that air eventually is going to come, what kind of effect could we expect here on the West Coast?
Again, you know, I'm not a soothsayer, but you know, it's very possible that radioactive fallout, we've seen radioactive fallout already from the Fukushima event.
I'm talking about if number four falls.
It would be a big problem.
If the rods...
It would be a big problem.
Again, it would be hemispheric, is the concern.
And it puts the accident...
It reignites the accident on a larger scale of catastrophe.
Dave in California, you're on the air with Paul.
Dave?
That's you.
Hi, Paul.
Hello, Roswell, New York.
I have two points that I'd like to discuss.
One is This is almost an international problem, instead of just a Japanese problem.
Absolutely.
And it seems to me, as unable as the United Nations is to work anything out, and whenever America needs to spend money, I mean, we can spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a website that doesn't work.
Isn't there any kind of an international fund to deal with this problem?
And two, getting The fact that we either have natural or man-made problems, and obviously a terrorist doesn't have to fly an airplane into a dome, they can just take out the generators and let physics do its part.
Isn't there almost an inevitability of this problem occurring again sometime in our lifetime?
Yes.
Yeah, well I have to say that I've been involved in this since 1975 and I've seen five reactors
melt down.
And...
And to say, I think it's very safe to say that these reactors are getting older and with less margin of safety because they are requiring more maintenance.
The companies are looking to take more shortcuts.
And as the profit motive is lost on the industry, our problems only really begin.
Now, he also asked about a international fund, perhaps channeled through the United Nations or whatever, to deal with the problem in Japan.
Yeah, well, you know, again, I was in Japan, in Tokyo, in December of 2012.
At the same time that the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency was in Kuriyama in a promotional event to restart Japan's reactors.
So the International Atomic Energy Agency arm of the United Nations is an active promoter For nuclear power.
And even though the Japanese public and the political will right now has every reactor, all 50 reactors in Japan are closed.
And there is a desperate effort for the Japanese government and the Japanese industry to get some of these reactors back online.
But right now, what was 54, they have 4 that are destroyed, and Fukushima 5 and 6 will never come back online, so that's down to 48.
But they are still trying to get a number of that 48 back online, and the UN arm is actively cheerleading Japan's restart of this dangerous technology.
Okay.
Steve in Indiana, your turn.
Hey Art, good to hear you back on the radio, and it's an honor to be on your show.
Thank you.
Paul?
Yes?
Yeah, first of all, I commend you on your intelligence on this subject, and you sure make coal seem like a piece of candy.
What about the idea, and I know it wouldn't work with the damaged plants on the planet and different things like that, but what about these plants that have everything up and functioning and everything's in good shape?
These little thermoses that you're talking about with, I guess, would be the fuel rods, is that correct?
Well, the thermoses I was talking about are the intermediate waste disposal units, you know, that would take the nuclear waste.
And they're licensed for 20 to 100 years.
But the waste goes on for millions.
So, you know, we're these are just basically stopgap measures.
But at Fukushima, we could buy time by getting all that nuclear waste that's sitting out there, just waiting for another earthquake or tsunami to get it.
Get it out of these mass concentrations in the pools of hundreds of tons and compartmentalize it in these smaller passive containment systems.
Right.
That's the goal.
Okay, my question is this.
These rods that are contained and properly done so, why couldn't we do what you're talking about with the container inside a container inside a container, blah, blah, blah, And put these things on a space shuttle to Pluto.
Well, I was in Concord, New Hampshire in January of 1986, when the Challenger blasted off and blew up with the Concord High School teacher, Krista McAuliffe.
So we were, you know, I was, I watched The shuttle operation, if that had been loaded with nuclear waste, you could kiss the East Coast off.
Yeah, it would have been at altitude, oh my God.
It would have been horrible.
You know, as you roll through all of these options and suggestions by people, there's nothing really good about any of them, is there?
Except to stop making it.
I mean, if anybody were to build a house uh... they would need to have a waste management plan this industry has been allowed uh... seventy years of uh... building uh... without an outhouse and if you know it's really time uh... to uh... come to grips with uh... that this is nothing more than a confidence game where the public has been the willing dupe of an industry that has
Always kick this can down to the next road, and the future generations are going to get all of the liability and not one watt of benefit.
And that, my friends, is criminal activity in my concern, because that's fraud.
Alright, well you've said it quite directly, my friend.
I appreciate your being here tonight.
Um, we're going to look into the possibility of involving you in a bit of a debate, if that's, uh, again, okay with you?
Yahoo!
I'll take that as a yes.
All right.
Thank you so very much, Paul, for being here tonight.
Have a great night.
Thank you, and no nukes.
No nukes.
All right.
Take care.
Well, there you have it.
That's it for this night.
I appreciate all of you being here.
For those of you left on the lines, which are full, Sorry.
We'll get to you next time, and there's only so much time in any given night.
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